It’s been planes, trains and automobiles for me lately. I just got back last week from a swing through Virginia, touring craft distilleries for an upcoming Southern Living feature and, along the way, hitting up a few barbecue joints and some very impressive farm table restaurants, too. Now I’m about to head to the airport for a much-anticipated vacation in Spain, where I’ll be conducting rigorous in-person research into fine jamón Ibérico, sherry, paella, and much, much more.
There will probably be a little newsletter hiatus until I’m back in the States later this month. After that, I have a full calendar of barbecue festivals and other culinary journeys planned, so there will be plenty to cover as the temperatures rise.
Before I go, let’s catch up on a little news and wrap up a few loose (or burnt) ends.
Beyond Redemption
Ironically, it was while I was in Richmond on my Virginia swing that I heard the news that Redemption BBQ was closing its doors. I had hoped to swing by on the way out of town last Monday, but the restaurant had reduced its hours and was only open Wednesday through Saturday last week, it’s final day of barbecue service.
In an email announcing the closure, Vest explained the decision:
This is a difficult time for restaurants because it’s a difficult time for consumers. Barbecue faces the additional challenge of a menu focused on expensive proteins. This is further compounded for Redemption BBQ because of my insistence on only using meat that was humanely-raised on pasture, which costs us two to three times the price of conventional meat (though even conventional meat is getting unsustainably expensive.)
Vest goes to on explain that his small storefront space in simply didn’t allow for the volume needed to make the barbecue business sustainable, and a planned (and expensive) expansion had been in the works since last year, but the project kept getting delayed and now has been postponed indefinitely. That prompted the difficult decision to stop selling barbecue.
For now, Vest is turning his attention to Chicago-style deep dish pizzas, which he has long been selling alongside smoked Virginia pastured-raised meats. “There might still be barbecue in my future,” he told me in a separate message, “but it’s hard to know.”
I hope he does find a way to return to it in the future, for I was a big fan of what he was doing at Redemption. (The restaurant earned a place on my list of the Best New BBQ Joints in the South in 2024 and landed at spot #45 on last year’s Top 50 BBQ Joints in the South.) The pastor-turned-pitmaster was committed to cooking only pasture-raised heritage pork, and he did it directly over hardwood coals and served classic Virginia-styles sauces alongside — a fruity, tart Southside Virginia sauce, a Northern Virginia apple-infused sauce, and Shenandoah Valley-style tangy vinegar.
That’s about as hyper-regional as a barbecue joint could get. Redemption BBQ will be missed.
No More Pitmasters With Beards?
On Tuesday last week, the James Beard Foundation released its list of nominees for the 2026 James Beard Restaurant and Chef Awards — which is to say, the short list of the five finalists for the Best Chef award in each region as well as the contenders for the national chef and restaurant awards. There wasn’t a single pitmaster or barbecue restaurant among them.
The longer list of semi-finalists, which was released back in January, was chock full of barbecue folks: eight for the various regional Best Chef awards along with David Kirkland and Ernest Servantes of Burnt Bean Co for the national Outstanding Chef award and Hector Garate of Palmira Barbecue right here in Charleston for Emerging Chef. None of them made it through to the final round.
If my memory is correct, this is the first time in more than a decade that the barbecue world has come up goose eggs in the Beard nominations. In 2015, Aaron Franklin of Franklin Barbecue became the first pitmaster to be nominated for a Beard, and he took home the award for Best Chef: Southwest that year. Pitmasters have been in contention for the cheffy awards ever since.
Strangely enough, my reaction to this turn of events is . . . relief.
Yes, barbecue is one of my main beats, and I have a vested interested in pumping and promoting it any time I can. But I’ve long had mixed feelings about putting pitmasters side-by-side with classically-trained chefs and trying to determine “the best.” They’re simply two different genres.
I had similar thoughts about Michelin’s treatment of barbecue restaurants in their recent guides for Texas and the American South. ( I vented my spleen on that topic in an op-ed for Southern Living back in November.) I could make a strong case why a place like Leroy & Lewis in Austin, which not only cooks top-notch and innovative barbecue but also has a pastry chef on staff and a deep slate of wine from Texas vineyards, deserves the star it received from Michelin the past two years running, but I’m not sure I would truly believe it. Trying to shoehorn counter-service barbecue joints — not to mention po-boy shops and pizzerias — alongside seven-course tasting menus and omakase sushi restaurants seems like comparing apples to oranges to watermelons.
This doesn’t mean that pitmasters shouldn’t be recognized for their artistry and skill, and I’ve never been one to say that barbecue is any less worthy of respect than a fancy chef’s menu. The wider we twist the lens, though, and the more genres we attempt to assess by a single rubric, the murkier and more arbitrary the judgments become.
It reminds me of the arguments people used to have back in the 20th century over whether rap should be considered poetry. Yes, rap is certainly poetic —spoken words, with meter and rhyme and all that — but there’s one huge difference between your typical rap album and, say, the work of those who have won a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry or received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop: I’d much rather hear a rapper perform than be subjected to one of those dreary poets droning on at a reading.
But I digress. In more than one of my commentaries on the Michelin Guide American South, I’ve made the case that the tire company’s inspectors should stick to fine dining and not try to sweep in every other culinary genre in the region. It would be a much stronger guide if they did. I’m going to double down and say the same thing about the Beard Awards. Why don’t we just say the “best chef” medals are reserved for actual chefs, and that means someone who leads a team of cooks in a formal, fine dining kitchen.
At a certain point you reach a point of reductio ad absurdum when you try to make the tent so large that it covers the entire fairground. If we are going to count as a "chef” the proprietor of a tiny noodle shop or a purveyor of chicken and waffles or — yes — a smoke-stained pitmaster in greasy overalls, why stop there? Why not nominate the grandma down the street who has a beloved recipe for buttermilk biscuits or my uncle, who doesn’t cook much but can grill a tasty ribeye?
I know, I know. This raises the question of genre boundaries and what exactly “fine dining” means. For me, it’s a little like Potter Stewart’s test for obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” And when I taste it, too.
Quick Bites
Turnabout is Fair Play: Two decades after Texas-style brisket and offset smokers began making incursions into Kansas City, J. C. Reid of the Houston Chronicle reports that a new food trailer, A Taste of Kansas City BBQ, is bringing KC-style sauce-slathered ribs and rib tips to H-Town.
A Brisket Fee: Lewis Donald of Sweet Lew’s BBQ in Charlotte, North Carolina, has come up with a novel solution to address the ever-rising price of brisket. As Queen City News reports, instead of just raising the price (which is currently $32 per pound), he’s making the increase even more obvious by adding a $3 surcharge per brisket order.
Burnt Ends
Presented Without Comment
Doing My Duty
You didn’t think I was going to let that whole brisket surcharge thing go without a wise-ass comment, did you? I’ve reached out to Lewis Donald to suggest than instead of a “surcharge” he call the extra $3 fee for brisket an “import tariff.” I’ve not heard any response yet, but I know he’s been busy getting ready for the Carolina BBQ Festival, and I’m sure he’ll get back to me soon.
As with booze and cigarettes, though, imposing taxes on smoked brisket seems to have little effect on demand. The Queen City News reporter interviewed a few Sweet Lew’s customers about the new charge, and the responses indicate that brisket is indeed a highly inelastic good.
“We didn’t really care about the price because we wanted brisket,” one customer said. “We don’t care what the price was. We just came to get it.”
Sounds like you should bump that surcharge up to $50, Lew.
