[upbeat music] This is unbelievable.

It's a full-blown barbecue campus.

I've heard about the long lines that people wait in just for the chance to eat at Prime Barbecue.

And now I'm finally here.

Can't wait to meet Chef Christopher.

He is a pitmaster.

[upbeat music] - I'm Christopher Prieto.

I'm head barbecue nerd here at Prime Barbecue in Knightdale, North Carolina.

I really wanted to create a space where you can enjoy great barbecue and you can still go out and live life within the community of Knightdale.

The building is built so that you have to slow down a little bit.

See, barbecue's all about patience.

It's all about pace.

It's all about slowing down and just enjoying the moment, smelling the smoke, tasting the meat.

- Oh my God.

- But also enjoying the people you're there with.

We have a beautiful kids area beside our building where kids can commune and play and meet each other.

We have a giant line that's intentionally slowed down so you can meet your neighbor, you can meet the person who drove here, you can meet people from other states.

We've actually had people that met here, proposed here, and got married here.

[gentle music] Our saying here is we want to make it worth the wait.

One of the goals of Prime Barbecue is to cook every style and really identify and be really champions of every style.

So we do have our pool pork here.

Again, lightly salt and pepper cooked over live oak and pecan wood coals.

Then we have our whole hog barbecue on Saturday.

So that's old school East Carolina style.

It's a whole pig cooked over rendered down coals.

The skin is crispy.

You get all the different components of the pig.

The only difference is we do it a little bit with a Puerto Rican fusion.

[upbeat music] This is where we're gonna cook our hogs.

Right now he's roasting the jalapenos for the jalapeno pimiento cheese sausage.

This is where we process our hog.

[upbeat music continues] Here we put up a little bit of trophies, so we have hundreds and hundreds of these trophies.

My wife arranged something beautiful here.

We had them all laid out here before we started and she just kind of arranged something nice.

Every trophy took a lot of hard work and practice.

These pits are made in Texas.

One of the first commercial cookers I ever cooked on.

They're the all wood fire commercial cookers.

So there's no gas, there's no fans, no assist.

- The real thing.

- The real thing.

These hold 1,300 pounds of meat at a time.

So this is our chef's table where we bring our veterans.

I sat at a lot of chef's table.

I've sat with the very important people at chef's table.

That's when I came to the realization that why isn't there a table where we can value the underappreciated?

And that's what we do here at Prime.

We support different Wounded Warrior organizations.

We have the chef's table.

Every military holiday here, they eat 100% free.

[gentle music] - Chris, what a spread.

And I have myself to blame for ordering all this stuff, but tell me about the side orders.

- Sure, so we wanted the sides to be scratch made and intentional, and they all tell a story.

Starting with my favorite side, this is our barbecue rice.

This is something that my mother and I kind of put together.

We have our coleslaw.

This is a North meets South Carolina based slaw.

Our beans are a meal within themselves, chopped brisket, barbecue sauce, lots of great seasoning.

Our green beans are actually cooked in clarified brisket fat, shallots, garlic, salt, and pepper.

Then we have our smoked gouda mac and cheese.

We ship in our own cheese, we grind it from scratch, make the cheese sauce from scratch.

All our desserts are made in-house from scratch.

Then we get to the meats.

- The meat of it all, yes!

- And again, everything's hand sliced by the ounce or by the pound, kind of however you want.

It's called market style.

So you get as little or as much as you want in this case.

We have our burnt ends, our sliced brisket, both our housemate sausages, our custom cut ribs.

We have chopped pork, we have sliced turkey.

- Christopher, I feel like I've done a lot of damage in the order here.

So let's dig in.

- Let's dig in.

You want a rib?

- I want a rib.

- Yeah, I want a rib too.

Let's get it.

Cheers?

- Cheers.

- No sauce.

- Fall right off the bone.

- In all of my barbecue travels, that's the one thing I see consistently is the community communes at the barbecue restaurant.

They meet each other, they have their meetings there.

And I really wanted to create something the same but new.

And I wanted to drive hospitality.

I wanted to drive experience.

I wanted to live beyond the plate of food I serve.

[upbeat music] - Prime Barbecue is at 403 Knightdale Station Run in Nightdale, and they're open Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 AM to 4:30 PM.

On Saturdays, they're open till 5:00.

For more information, give them a call at [919] 373-8067 or go online to prime-bbq.com.