Devour some of the nation’s best barbecue dishes, sip craft cocktails in a historic hotel, sample unique brews, and enjoy decadent desserts.
Do it all on a trip to Rabun County on an unexpected food and drink journey!
Alongside Highway 441 in Dillard, Georgia, you might spot a pig mobile. It’s a unique sight! But more importantly, that means you’ve arrived at Blue Hound Barbecue.
“Barbecue is so simple on the surface; I mean, it’s salt, pepper, smoke and meat and just a lot of patience, but it’s a tough craft to master,” Kyle Bryner told WSBTV.com’s Nelson Hicks. “And so I think that’s what is appealing to me is it’s something that anybody could do in their backyard, but to do it at a high level consistently, it’s like chasing that dragon that you’re always trying to defeat. And I guess I just love a good challenge.”
Bryner is chef, owner and pitmaster at Blue Hound Barbecue.
Menu highlights include barbecue egg rolls, a beef cheek plate and a brisket cheesesteak dip. But you can’t visit without eating the chicken fried ribs.
“So we take ribs that we would cook just like any other rack of ribs on our menu,” Bryner explained. “We’ll cool them down, and we’ll treat them just like fried chicken. We’ll cut the bones a little bit thicker. We’ll batter those up, and we’ll fry them.”
The chicken fried ribs topped his ‘Ode to Appalachia’ feast on the Food Network’s “BBQ Brawl,” a competition that gathered the best barbecue pitmasters in the country.
“I saw World Barbecue Champions, I saw James Beard, multiple-time nominees, some people from Top Chef and these chefs that have made a name for themselves in the industry already and here’s a no-name guy from Dillard, Ga., in the midst of all this barbecue royalty and chef street creds all over the place in here,” Bryner said.
“So I just didn’t wanna be the first one to go home. That’s what I told myself. Like, ‘just don’t be the first to go home.’ And every day I’d get up and say the same thing. ‘Just don’t go home today.’ And I ended up winning the whole thing.”
Spend some time in the smokehouse, and you’ll start to understand just how this small-town barbecue pitmaster’s Southern Appalachian barbecue captured gold.
“To hear folks like Bobby Flay and Rodney Scott and Brooke Williams tell me, like, ‘this is phenomenal food, you are the best out of all these.’ These fine barbecue folks, it really kind of solidified that, okay, maybe we are doing something special here, and it gives me a little more confidence and a little bit more pride in representing my community with some world-class barbecue,” Bryner said.
World-class is a title that describes the chicken fried ribs. This single dish alone is reason enough to make the drive to Rabun County.
But it’s not the only reason. The Vandiver is an American tavern-style eatery housed inside the historic Bridge Creek Inn in the city of Clayton. The Vandiver invites guests to embark on a culinary journey steeped in regional flavor.
From the opening cocktail, be it the Vandiver Old Fashioned, the White Lotus or the Golden Tide...
“So the cocktail is also kind of like made from scratch, juices and all that stuff,” Jorge Rivero said, noting they “offer a variety of liquors all the way from vodka to mezcal” and switch offerings seasonally for spring, summer, winter and fall.
The restaurant’s menu features starters like artichoke and spinach dip.
Rivero also highlighted a popular entree, stating, “The chicken piccata is definitely our top seller, so it’s a little lemon cream sauce with noodles and chicken with parmesan cheese.”
The chef notes every dish at The Vandiver evokes the spirit and flavor of the North Georgia region with ingredients sourced from locals.
The menus combine the familiarity and comfort of American classics with contemporary twists that create an unforgettable culinary experience.
After the meal, spend the night at the Bridge Creek Inn. The boutique hotel in the heart of Clayton captures the charm of Main Street and offers a home base to experience all there is to eat and drink in the North Georgia mountains.
Need another reason for a visit?
“During the summer we’ll get a lot more of, say, like this peach beer, which is our peach wheat, which is a very good seller in the summer, and look at the color of it; it’s really nice, made with real peaches, not artificial flavors,” Currahee Brewing’s Joshua Seymour said.
Born in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, Currahee Brewing Company brews bold beers at its downtown Clayton location.
“One time the owner had habanero, had a lot of habaneros, right? He was like, ‘well, I should probably make something with this.’ Habanero pepper porter was born, and it was really good,” Seymour said.
From the Bride of Frankenstark, a Belgian dark ale, to Beach Please, a pineapple-coconut tart ale, if discovering a new brew is worth a trip, a visit to Currahee is worth a week-long getaway!
“We’ve got 14 (beers) on draft,” Seymour noted. “We always want to try to get a wheat beer on (draft), like have a (Hefeweizen) to have that option or a sour beer or even a dark beer.”
Currahee Brewing Company is both dog-friendly and kid-friendly, providing activities like pool and cornhole for visitors. For evening entertainment, the brewery hosts trivia night on Thursdays and music bingo on Friday nights.
If world championship barbecue, craft cocktails, farm-to-table dining and bold brews aren’t worth a visit, maybe a trip to Main Street Chocolates is.
“We have several hundred different chocolate items, so we kind of want to overwhelm you when you walk in and then help you zero down to what’s going to make you the happiest,” owner Jerry Moore Jr. said.
The sweet smell of caramel corn cooking, the sight of tantalizing treats filling the display cases- witness the chocolate and caramel construction of dream desserts.
“We have our caramel apples here; we make our caramel from scratch, and then they’re pretty good all by themselves, but we like to add a little fun to them too, so we’re just going to drizzle some milk chocolate on this apple here. So now you’ve got the healthy apple at the core, Granny Smith apple, caramel and chocolate,” Moore Jr. said.
Main Street Chocolates makes almost everything in the store. From turtle crispies to turtle puffs to peanut butter buckeyes to chocolate-covered strawberries, it offers a variety of chocolate treats.
“So we offer a little bit of everything here, but it’s all sweet, so you don’t come here for your grow food; you come here for your fun food. We tell people, you don’t need us, you want us,” Moore Jr. said.
Crave might be the better word for all these chocolate treats!
Rabun County ranks as the waterfall capital of Georgia. Hiking trails abound. The natural beauty is unmatched. But so, too, is some of the food.
Immerse yourself in a food and beverage adventure on a trip to Rabun County in the North Georgia Mountains.
Just save some chicken fried ribs for me!
[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]
[SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
This story is sponsored by Explore Rabun.
©2026 Cox Media Group
