Barbecue beef: A North Carolina restaurant chain gets grilled after canceling a franchisee pact.

• Author: Martin, Edward

Like a marriage, there were happy times at the Smithfield's Chicken VN Bar-B-Q in Leland. The town, just across the Brunswick River from Wilmington, was growing fast but maintaining its Tar Heel roots. Once a month, restored vintage cars such as '66 Mustangs and '55 Chevys would emerge from backyard garages set back in the pines to park with hoods open like hungry mouths in front of the restaurant that opened in 2009.

Mike Musselwhite and business partner Brian Cheshire invited owners to their diner for the regular antique car show. They knew car buffs would likely sample the restaurant's menu of homemade pork-shoulder barbecue, fried chicken, potato salad and coleslaw.

"We even make all the sauces," Musselwhite would brag.

Over the next 15 years, the Wilmington native and UNC Wilmington graduate with a culinary degree from Cape Fear Community College, and Cheshire would expand Whiteshire Foods to include four Smithfield's restaurants in Brunswick and New Hanover counties.

They were moneymakers, dishing up what some consider the state's only truly native food, pork barbecue, while bearing the imprint of pork giant Smithfield Foods, which has its biggest plant in Bladen County. The Chinese-owned company licenses its name but has no other role at the restaurant chain, which is based in the Johnston County seat of Smithfield, 30 miles southeast of Raleigh.

Musselwhite's honeymoon formally ended in late June.

That's when a U.S. Eastern District Court judget awarded him and Whiteshire Foods $498,000 in a civil lawsuit, ruling that the chain, and its owners, Mid-Atlantic Restaurant Group and Cary Keisler Inc., engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices when they terminated the Whiteshire franchises. Cary Keisler is a company affiliated with the chain.

The suit, says Musslewhite's attorney, Brad Hill, contends Smithfield's Chicken "N Bar-B-Q encouraged Whiteshire to invest millions of dollars and years of effort in the four franchises it operated between 2000 and 2014. That process of attracting loyal customers and taking necessary business risks came to naught when the franchisor allegedly cooked up excuses to end the franchise agreements and take over the restaurants.

The half-million-dollar award, Hill says, compensates for lost revenue and profit. It followed about six years of legal wrangling. Musselwhite now works in commercial real estate and as a restaurant consultant.

"The pressure to reinvest in the franchise gets greater and...