Ray Holloway has been eating at LC’s Bar-B-Q on Lakeshore Parkway for going on eleven years, and he still orders the same thing every time: a sliced pork sandwich with extra sauce, a side of baked beans, and a sweet tea that comes in a Styrofoam cup so big it barely fits in his truck’s cupholder. “I’ve tried other stuff,” he told me once, sliding into the booth across from me. “I always come back to the sandwich.” Ray is a former HVAC contractor in his late sixties, retired now, and he treats LC’s like a standing Tuesday appointment.
LC’s has been feeding Birmingham-area folks since the mid-1990s, and the Hoover location on Lakeshore Parkway pulls a crowd that skews local in a way that chain restaurants around here never quite manage. The strip-mall setting won’t win any design awards, but the smell hits you in the parking lot — hickory smoke, sweet tomato, that particular char you only get from a real pit. Inside, the walls are paneled, the booths are vinyl, and the TV is usually on something nobody’s really watching. It feels like the room hasn’t changed since it opened, which is meant as a compliment.
The menu is straightforward Alabama barbecue: pulled pork, sliced pork, ribs, chicken, links. The sauce is thick and slightly sweet with a good vinegar backbone — not Memphis, not Texas, something that belongs here. I’m partial to the sliced brisket on days they have it, but the pulled pork is the foundation. Get it on a bun or on a plate with two sides. The sides are serious: the baked beans have chunks of meat in them, the coleslaw is creamy without being cloying, and the potato salad is the kind your grandmother would have approved of.
What I find myself telling people is that LC’s rewards regulars. The staff recognizes faces. When Ray walks in, whoever’s at the counter usually just calls back his order without asking. That kind of familiarity is rarer than it used to be, and it matters more than people admit when they’re talking about what makes a place worth returning to.
Lunch is the peak time — go between 11:30 and 1 and expect a line, though it moves fast. The crowd is a genuine cross-section: construction workers, teachers on a break, older couples, the occasional table of guys in button-downs from one of the nearby office parks. Dinner is quieter and sometimes the pork is more tender from sitting in the warmer, though occasionally they run out of certain cuts by late afternoon, so it’s worth calling ahead if you’re set on ribs.
Prices are honest. A sandwich and two sides runs somewhere around nine or ten dollars. A full rib plate will set you back a bit more, but not by much. This is not the place to Instagram your food. It is the place to eat well without thinking too hard about it.
Ray summed it up once in a way I’ve never bothered to improve on: “It doesn’t try to be anything. It just is what it is.” That’s LC’s on Lakeshore Parkway, and in a part of Hoover increasingly crowded with concepts and brands, that counts for a lot.
