Eat Like a King: Corrie and Shuai Wang have been hosting regular Sunday night King BBQ suppers at their Spruill Avenue restaurant, Jackrabbit Filly, until their Chinese-inspired barbecue spot opens nearby this summer. (Right, clockwise from top left) Roast five-spice duck, char siu ribs, soy sauce chicken, shrimp toast, crispy Brussels sprouts, spicy udon noodles, barbecue fried rice, and moo shu pork with pancakes.
Written by Robert F. Moss
Photographs by Peter Frank Edwards
The idea of community was also front and center for restaurateurs Shuai and Corrie Wang as they mapped out their next venture. Named King BBQ, it will be opening soon on Carver Avenue in North Charleston, just down the road from their popular eatery, Jackrabbit Filly.
At King BBQ, the Wangs plan to offer quick-service items like noodle and rice bowls for those who need to grab a meal to-go, but the real goal, Shuai says, is to “have an environment where, if you want to hang out, you can actually just hang out—watch the game, have some really great ‘trashy fancy’ cocktails, and, down the line, listen to live music.”
The Wangs moved down to Charleston from New York in August 2014, thinking they had jobs at a soon-to-open restaurant. When that didn’t pan out, they launched their Short Grain food truck, which they transitioned to the brick-and-mortar Jackrabbit Filly at the end of 2019.
So why would restaurateurs who made their bones on rice bowls and karaage (Japanese fried chicken) turn next to barbecue? “We always have tons and tons of ideas running in our heads,” Shuai says. They considered a cocktail bar, an oyster bar, and a bakery. Ultimately, they turned back to the team they already had onboard at Jackrabbit Filly.
“We have all these talented people that need room to grow,” Shuai says. “And you can only grow so much within a small restaurant.” Their sous chef, Brandon Olson, grew up in the Piedmont of North Carolina, where he was immersed in the Lexington barbecue style. He learned his way around wood-fired pits while working across town at Home Team BBQ. Now he’s the pitmaster and chef de cuisine for King BBQ.
“It just felt like barbecue was the way to go,” Corrie says. “This was after the pandemic. We can do counter service, and it can still be a beautiful space, and it can maybe be a little easier on the kitchen.” The original idea, as Shuai puts it, was to “do Southern barbecue and have a Chinese twist to it. We’d serve it on butcher paper, with little paper boats on the side, do our twist on mac and cheese and collard greens.”
The team piloted those ideas last fall in a series of pop-ups at Edmund’s Oast Brewery. “It was like the second pop-up in,” Corrie recalls, “and we’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t want to do this.’”
“There’s a lot of great places [in Charleston] that already do those kinds of items,” Shuai explains. “If we do the same thing, it’s going to look like we’re trying too hard to fit in somewhere that we don’t really belong.”
They ended up putting the spin in the opposite direction. “We thought, ‘Chinese barbecue is amazing as is,’” Shuai says. “We just have to figure out a way to highlight the South as well. So we’re going more toward the direction of an old-school Chinatown barbecue restaurant—your barbecue pork and your roast pork and your soy sauce chicken.”
For Shuai, this is getting back to his roots. He was born in Beijing and moved to Queens, New York, in 1996. “I grew up eating at all those places in Flushing,” he says, “all the Chinatown barbecue restaurants with char siu [Cantonese barbecue pork] and soy sauce chickens.”
Most of the meats at King BBQ will be smoked Southern-style over white oak on three 1,000-gallon Lang offset smokers, but they’ll be finished in ways more akin to a Chinese restaurant. “We’ll be cold-smoking chicken,” Shuai explains, “and poaching it in a soy liquid for our soy sauce chickens.” Many of the favorites that emerged from the pop-ups will be on the menu, too, including ribs lacquered in bright red char siu glaze, house-made sausages, and chicken wings that are smoked then crisp fried, Chinese take-out style. This being the Lowcountry, there is mustard-based barbecue sauce, but it’s a Chinese-inflected “hot mustard ’cue.”
For their ducks, Shuai adds, “We’re going very old-school Chinese barbecue—just roasting them. We cure them in our house cure, and we’ve got these double-decker Alto-Shaam rotisserie ovens. We’ll be roasting the duck in that.”
The Wangs expect King BBQ to open this summer.
King BBQ
2029 Carver Ave.
eatkingbbq.com
WATCH - Meet Shuai and Corrie Wang and watch their Chinese-inspired barbecue dishes being prepared
