About

I’ve been a student of barbecue since I stood in the backyard and watched my Dad slather his homemade BBQ sauce on everything from snapping turtles to turtle doves. As soon as my teeth cut their ways through my gums, my momma forked minced barbecue into my maw, fresh from Short Sugar’s Barbecue in Reidsville, North Carolina, where the savory aroma of sizzling shoulders drifted into our backyard whenever the wind was blowing in the right direction. I studied at the formica counters of Fuzzy’s in Madison when visiting my grandparents and Chal Woollen’s store at Iron Works on Sunday drives with my dad.Then there was Lexington, N.C., with its many and varied pits, which my family would stop at on the way to visit relatives.

But please don’t get the notion that I’m one of these provincial peckerwoods who thinks there’s only one true barbecue. In fact, that’s the reason I started a blog — to open people’s minds and mouths to different kinds of cue. My mother was Pennsylvania Dutch and while we might have collard greens with hog jowl for lunch, for supper we’d just as likely sit down to the likes of German-inspired hasenpfeffer, a good old cottontail rabbit braised with apples. My wife will tell you that my career in journalism was driven as much by my quest for ‘cue as anything else.As an aerospace editor covering the Space Shuttle, I definitely followed my nose like any good journalist, sampling ribs near mission control when in Houston, sucking crawfish heads while watching shuttle engines light up in Slidell, Louisiana, and savoring Caribbean-inspired goat ribs not too far from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Transitioning to an editor/travel writer for Sky, Delta’s inflight magazine, simply gave my obsession wings, so to speak. I’ve tried everything from guinea pigs roasted by Peruvian Incas to iguana tacos in Ometepec, Mexico. Several years ago, I had the privilege of studying under two men, Ed Roith and Ardie Davis, who helped make competition barbecue what it is today — officially the No. 1 national pasttime and food craze in the United States — no less than Saveur magazine says so. Under them, I became a certified Kansas City Barbecue Society judge. Sampling and judging barbecue at the Jack Daniel’s World Champtionship Invitiation Barbecue, gave me a lot of perspective and fueled my obsession with cue. I was able to try barbecue not just from all over the United States, but sample cue from teams that came all the way from England, Germany and Australia.

So I’ve been on something of a lifelong barbecue odyssey and in my travels across the latitudes and longitudes of the world and the United States, I’ve learned you can get good barbecue almost anywhere because true cue comes from the heart, not from any region.