Most barbecue chains give you a wall of six or eight sauces and let you sort it out. Full Moon Bar-B-Que does the opposite: one house sauce, and a pickled relish that does the work a second sauce would do everywhere else. Understanding chow chow is most of understanding this menu.
The house sauce
Full Moon runs a sweet-and-tangy tomato sauce as its default. That is the Alabama norm outside the northern part of the state — thinner and sharper than a Kansas City molasses sauce, sweeter than a Carolina vinegar mop, and built to sit on hickory-smoked pork without burying it.
It belongs on the pork, which is what this kitchen is built around. It works on the Bar-B-Que Chicken, both the half at $15.99 and the quarter dark at $10.99. It is unnecessary on the ribs — the Classic Rib Plate and Baby Back Rib Plate, both $16.99, arrive glazed, and adding more sauce turns them into a sugar delivery system.
Chow chow — the real signature
Chow chow is a tangy pickled cabbage-and-pepper relish, Southern in origin, served on the pork sandwiches and available alongside almost everything else. It is not a garnish and it is not optional in any meaningful sense — it is the point of the sandwich.
Functionally it does the same job vinegar sauce does in Carolina barbecue: it cuts the fat of the pork and resets your palate between bites. Sweet tomato sauce alone on chopped pork gets cloying by the third mouthful. Acid and crunch fix that, and Full Moon's answer is a relish rather than a thin vinegar sauce.
If you have never had it, order the regular BBQ Pork Sandwich at $6.99 exactly the way it comes rather than asking for it plain. People who order it plain on a first visit tend to conclude that Full Moon's pork is unremarkable, and they are judging half the dish.
Alabama white sauce: the honest answer
This is the most common misconception about the brand, so it is worth being precise. Alabama white sauce — mayonnaise, vinegar and a lot of black pepper — is a north Alabama tradition from Decatur, tied historically to smoked chicken. Because it carries the state's name, people assume every Alabama barbecue restaurant leads with it.
Full Moon does not. It is a Birmingham operation founded in 1986 and built on pork, tomato sauce and chow chow. White sauce is not the house style here. Some locations carry it — with around thirty restaurants there is genuine variation — so if that is what you came for, ask at the counter rather than assuming it will be on the table.
| Sauce | Base | Where it belongs |
|---|---|---|
| House sweet-and-tangy | Tomato | Pork, chicken, pork links |
| Chow chow | Pickled cabbage and pepper | Pork sandwiches, most plates |
| Alabama white | Mayonnaise and vinegar | Smoked chicken and turkey — ask locally |
If white sauce is available at your location, put it on the Hickory-Smoked Turkey plate ($16.99) or the quarter chicken. That is the pairing it was invented for. It is heavy on mayonnaise, so it is also the calorie-dense choice among the three — a point covered further in the Full Moon nutrition guide.
Matching sauce to what you ordered
- BBQ Pork Sandwich ($6.99 regular / $8.29 large) — chow chow on it, house sauce lightly. Do not add both heavily.
- Rib Sandwich (1 bone $3.69, 2 bones $6.59, 3 bones $8.99) — nothing extra. The bread already catches everything.
- Bar-B-Que Pork plate ($14.99) — sauce on the side so the meat does not sit in it.
- Smoked Pork Links ($14.99) — house sauce. Pimento cheese, from the $9.99 starter plate, is the local answer.
- Southern Fried Catfish ($13.99 / $19.99) — neither. It is a fried fish plate, not a barbecue one.
How this fits the wider map
Full Moon is a pork-and-tomato house with a relish where other regions put acid in liquid form. That is a specific tradition, not a compromise between others. It is not Texas barbecue, where sauce is optional and beef is the point, and it is a step away again from the Carolina and Memphis approaches mapped out in the smokehouse guide. Order the pork, keep the chow chow, and treat white sauce as a bonus rather than the reason you came.