As our June/July issue was going to press, a pitched battle was taking place on the Garden & Gun website that reverberated across our social media channels. For our annual Southern bracket, this year we asked readers to vote on the best takeout biscuit in the South. Just narrowing down the initial field to thirty-two entrants was a thorny task, with national and regional chains, convenience stores, and local favorites all in the mix. Then we unleashed the bracket. Immediately, things got heated. And hearts got broken.
In the locals section, my own favorite, the sausage biscuit from Sewee Outpost in Awendaw, South Carolina, went down early. Among the gas stations, Golden Pantry’s sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, straight from my Georgia youth, fell to Parker’s Kitchen. I still remember salving the wounds of a turkey-hunting whiff with one or two of those foil-wrapped delights from the Pantry.
I wasn’t the only one with hurt feelings. The debate raged on Facebook. One commenter wrote, “People picking Chick-fil-A over Hardee’s need to have a real buttermilk biscuit introduced to their life.” Another added, “Sorry, Bojangles should have won.”
As the contest went on, it came down to the final four: Hardee’s squaring off against Parker’s, and West Virginia legend Tudor’s Biscuit World against Norfolk, Virginia’s Handsome Biscuit. A national TV morning show got in on the fun, with the hosts delightedly digging into a pile of the surviving competitors (“Mine has a hash brown on it!”), and local news outlets cheered on their hometown favorite.
I won’t pretend the discourse was always congenial. Let’s just say emotions ran high. In the end, it was the Tudor’s Mountaineer—laden with country ham, egg, cheese, and a crunchy hash brown—versus the Parker’s sausage, egg, and cheese for the title. For four days, voting tipped one way, then the other. But Tudor’s ultimately took the crown with 56 percent of the vote. “I have had my own body weight in Tudor’s,” one fan noted. “Next to my grandmother’s, so far, there are none better.”
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