No Pigs, Plain Ole’ Pigs, and Cannibal Pigs
Exploring the Visual Culture of South Carolina Barbecue
In May 2020, in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, a then-graduate student named Nathan Spainhour reached out to ask if he could interview me. He was working on the thesis for his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in graphic design, and the topic was the visual culture of South Carolina barbecue. How could I say no?
Fast forward almost six years, and that MFA thesis has been transformed into a lushly-illustrated book entitled The South Carolina BBQ Project, which was just published by Good Printed Things. I was honored to be asked to write the foreword to the commercial edition, and I’m sharing it this week as a Cue Sheet dispatch.
If you want to get your hands on a copy of the book — and you really should, since as a design study it’s graphically rich and quite unlike any other volume out there — you can order one from Good Printed Things or from your favorite bookseller.
Foreword to The South Carolina Barbecue Project
[The South Carolina BBQ Project] is an exploration of the visual culture of barbecue in South Carolina, but it’s more than just a feast for the eyes. It takes us on a culinary tour of the Carolinas, from the Upstate through the Midlands and into the Pee Dee and Lowcountry. It delves into the history and the many diverse flavors of the state’s rich barbecue tradition, tracing, as Spainhour puts it, the “complex and winding path of a cuisine.”
There’s plenty to explore, too, for South Carolina has one of the oldest and most complex traditions of any of America’s great barbecue regions. Barbecue is indeed “the hub of a much larger wheel,” to borrow Spainhour’s phrase. You can’t talk about it without delving into any number of other topics, like history, geography, race, and politics, to name just a few.
I might quibble with a few of the assertions found within the book. I would classify South Carolina, for instance, as being part of “the regular South” along with North Carolina and most of Virginia. [Spainhour places the state in the Deep South in his map on page 22.] For me, the Deep South starts somewhere south and west of Atlanta, but Spainhour’s geography is a very “personal map of the South,” as he freely admits in Part 1. This book is unapologetically personal in its outlook, which is exactly how it should be with barbecue.
A native of Anderson in the Upstate, Spainhour is adamant in his opinions, which are deeply rooted in the Palmetto State. He sees no need to explain that by “barbecue” he means pork, not smoked beef or barbecued chicken. While he notes in passing that a few states to our west have their own long-running barbecue traditions, he declares definitively that “anyone who knows anything about barbecue knows that it’s North and South Carolina that is the heart of the institution.” I won’t argue with that.
It may be opinionated, but the South Carolina BBQ Project is finely attuned to the many nuances of the state’s barbecue culture and to the evolving nature of that tradition. The text offers insightful delineations of the state’s sub-regional variations and how they have evolved over time. From mustard sauce’s recent migration far beyond its Midlands roots to the even more recent incursion of Texas-style brisket, Spainhour chronicles how old lines are blurring and once-distinct styles are coming together in the 21st century.
He doesn’t shy away from the less savory side of the story, either. The book addresses head-on the dark side of industrial pork production in the 21st century and the legacy of Maurice Bessinger’s Piggy Park restaurants in Columbia. There are plenty of more pleasant detours, too. Spainhour delves into South Carolina’s somewhat mythic “Truth in Barbecue” law and the complex orthography of barbecue, including the distinction between “garish and trashy ‘q’” and the “upwardly mobile and buttoned-down ‘c.’” (I will admit to being in the buttoned-down camp myself.)
More than anything, this is a book about visual design. That starts with the design of the book itself. From the engaging color scheme—all reds, browns, and yellows—to the many maps, chapter ornaments, and graphical vignettes, the pages are as beautiful as they are stylish.
Spainhour has a keen eye for the visual nature of barbecue and what it means, be it the pig imagery used at barbecue restaurants to the typefaces on the signs and menus. The book explores how that imagery connects to the themes and connotations of barbecue and reflects the tension between nostalgia and the future.
I suspect that after reading this book you’ll never look at South Carolina barbecue quite the same way again. I, for one, will no longer enter a barbecue joint without pausing first to assess the category in which its iconography belongs: “no pigs”, “plain ole’ pigs”, “anthropomorphic pigs”, or the somewhat disturbing “cannibal pigs.”
I suspect, too, that reading this book will make you hungry enough to hit the road for a South Carolina barbecue tour of your own. It certainly had that effect on me.
Want a sneak peek at The South Carolina BBQ Project? Check out the book’s web site, which has lots of samples of the imagery to be found in the volume.
On the Interwebs and In Print
Southern Living’s annual South’s Best issue is out, and while once again I did not get honored as the South’s best hushpuppy historian nor best ham advocate, I did contribute a lot of words to the issue:
As I do each year, I wrote the blurbs for the restaurants chosen by our readers as The Best Barbecue Joint in Every Southern State. There wasn’t a ton of movement in this year’s list compared to 2025, but there were a few notable and perhaps unexpected new names.
This year, the readers picked Southern Soul Barbeque as not only the best BBQ joint in Georgia but the very best in all of the South. I paid a return visit to this St. Simons Island favorite and explained why Southern barbecue fans love it so much.
I’m covering a lot of non-barbecue restaurants for Southern Living these days, too, and I got to profile of one of my favorite Charleston fine dining establishments, FIG, which our readers picked as The Best Classic Restaurant in the South.
As a reminder, the South’s Best issue comes out each spring, and all the lists and awards are based on a poll of over 17,000 readers. My own personal picks — in the form of Southern Living’s biennial Top 50 BBQ Joints in the South and Best New BBQ Joints lists — come out on a different cycle. The next iteration of the Best New BBQ Joints will be released in early fall this year, and the Top 50 will be back in 2027.
The Tip Jar is Open
Since the Best New BBQ joints list is due in a few months, I’m currently burning up the highways and visiting as many new places as I can, which generally means ones that have opened since our last Best New list was published in August 2024. For that, I need your help.
Do you know of a worthy new barbecue joint that opened in 2024 or later that I need to be sure to visit? If so, drop me an email or leave a comment on this post, and I’ll make sure it’s on my candidate list.
Quick Hits
Kissing the Bridesmaids: J.C. Reid of the Houston Chronicle suggests that visitors to Texas’s legendary barbecue towns like Seguin, Lexington, and Lockhart should consider skipping the long lines at the top-rated spot and going to the town’s second most popular barbecue joint instead.
Let the People Decide: Axios Miami reports that a Miami community redevelopment agency is taking a novel approach to selecting the tenant that will take over the space that formerly housed People’s Bar-B-Que in the Overtown neighborhood. The agency has spent $1.5 million rehabbing the building, including constructing a new barbecue pit, and will be staging a blind cook-off in which the community will choose which applicant should be given a lease for the space.
Austin Evolution: Veronica Mewes, who in November published the book Texas BBQ: The Art of Low and Slow, explains in Tribeza how Austin evolved into a global barbecue destination, from old school joints like House Park Bar-B-Que to craft pioneers like Franklin and Stiles Switch.
Old School Expansion: MySA.com reports that Davila’s BBQ, which has been a fixture in Seguin, Texas, since 1959, is taking its brisket, ribs, and sausage to a larger market when it opens a second location later this year in Universal City, a suburb northeast of San Antonio.
Branching Out Beyond BBQ: Start Land News reports that Jeff and Joy Stehney, the owners of Joe’s KC BBQ in Kansas City, are opening a new restaurant called Joe’s Next Door directly across the street from the Shamrock gas station that hosts the original Joe’s KC’s location . The neighborhood restaurant will feature the popular Z-Man barbecue sandwich and other Joe’s KC barbecue items along with a broader menu that will include smoked salmon and a slate of cocktails.
Jumping the Shark, on a Lake: The Columbia Free Times reports that Cody and Paul Bessinger, scions of the family that owns Maurice’s Piggy Park in Columbia, South Carolina, have opened a new barbecue restaurant on the shores of Lake Murray. Named Driftwood Smokehouse, its offering is a departure from the long-running Bessinger family mode, for it features shrimp, catfish, cowboy beans (“a Tex Mex flare on baked beans”) as well as — yes, you guessed it — slow-smoked beef brisket.
Burnt Ends
Paging Derek Zoolander
I know a few readers will always confuse Southern Living’s South’s Best BBQ list, which is the product of a reader poll, with its Top 50 BBQ Joints in the South, which is the one picked by me. You might expect trained journalists to read a little closer and pick up on the nuances, but, man, did the Mississippi Clarion Ledger make a hash of it.
“Southern Living named a Mississippi restaurant one of the Top 50 barbecue places in the country for the second year in a row,” reads the opening of the Clarion Ledger’s article. This is incorrect on many levels.
I guess I should have tried harder to make the distinction clearer in my write-up of the readers’ picks, which was admittedly pretty subtle:
The Clarion Ledger goes on to report that Southern Living also named The Shed as the best in the state in 2025, then adds “Mississippi was snubbed in 2024.”
Our readers emphatically did not snub Mississippi in 2024, for the state was included in the South’s Best poll that year, too. Once again it was The Shed that came out on top — as it also did in 2023, 2022, and 2019. Like a lot of publications, Southern Living paused its “best of” lists during the pandemic, but if we had polled readers in 2020 and 2021, The Shed almost certainly would have won, too.
If you click that “snubbed” link, it takes you not to the 2024 South’s Best article but to a Clarion Ledger article reporting on my Top 50 editor’s list in 2024. I know, I know. This stuff is confusing!
Perhaps I and my editors should have done more, since it’s terribly unreasonable to expect a journalist on deadline to read all the way to the end of whatever article they are cribbing from when writing a story. Maybe right after that opening paragraph we should have explained the process behind the list, and maybe even put it inside a big red box so it’s hard to miss. You know, something like this:
The Critics Gave It a Glowing Review
Molly Wilhelm, the “Trending Reporter” for the Houston Chronicle (seriously, that’s the title in her byline) reports that a $23 million nuclear research facility is coming to the barbecue capital of Texas. Atomic Alchemy, Inc. is constructing a new 7,600-square-foot concrete building in Lockhart, complete with an on-premise nuclear reactor.
The Chronicle reporter notes that details remain scarce but infers from the company’s regulatory filings that the reactor will be used to produce radioisotopes for use in nuclear medicine. I’m not so sure. How do we know they aren’t actually going to be cooking mutant brisket in that thing?
Barbecue Hope Springs Eternal
The Idaho Statesman reports that a new Dickey’s Barbecue Pit franchise just opened in Boise, though it does seems to be in something of a cursed location. A long-running Mexican restaurant on the site burned down in 2019, and the building that replaced it housed Meltz Extreme Grilled Cheese from 2022 to 2024 and then Matty G’s Steakburgers & Lobsta’ Rolls, which closed last summer after just a year in business.
OK, maybe it was the restaurants’ names and not the location that sunk those predecessors, but the Statesman does note that all four previous Dickey’s Barbecue Pit locations in Idaho’s Treasure Valley region closed permanently in 2024.
On the plus side, I’ll note that the menu for the new location does offer pit-smoked loaded baked potatoes, so maybe it will do just fine in Idaho.
