![]() ![]() It takes years to develop the proper vocabulary and recognition of certain physical cues. The meat will let you know when it’s ready, but the message isn’t so easily deciphered by a novice. ![]() In an open pit, a whole hog’s hiss through a steady drip onto wood embers is its own love language. Its undulations are a sign that conditions are exactly right. A brisket will dance for you when it feels like it - and only when it feels like it. It requires patience and commitment, which over time reveal patterns and rhythms. “With those two guys in the same city right beside each other, that’s a one-two punch, and I don’t think you can beat it.”īarbecue is a process of coaxing out secrets barbecue is a romance. “You have the master of Texas and the master of Carolina,” Sean Brock, the James Beard Award–winning chef of Husk in Charleston and Nashville, told me. In a short time, it’s become proof that excellence is not inherently adversarial. Their origins, techniques, and perspectives may be different, but their fated union in Charleston wasn’t ever about determining one’s superiority over the other. Together, they make up the biggest, most important piece in barbecue’s modern puzzle. Scott and Lewis have brought over half a century’s worth of barbecue knowledge to the Holy City. Scott is the native son, bringing Charleston a vision of South Carolina’s rural Pee Dee region that had been absent from the state’s premier food destination Lewis is the interloper, a Texan who had the balls to have a mural painted at his restaurant depicting a bull, almost Vedic in design, accompanied by the words “ALL HAIL THE KING” - in pig country. Scott’s calling is the hog Lewis’s is beef. Proximity ties the two men together, but it’s their differences that weave Charleston’s new, compelling barbecue narrative out of cultural dichotomies older than America itself. The brief jaunt along Romney Street, under the I-26 overpass that knifes between King Street and Meeting Street, is more or less all that separates two barbecue giants at the height of their craft. Less than 12 months earlier, on June 28, 2016, John Lewis, one of the pitmasters who turned Austin, Texas, into the hottest barbecue destination in America through his work at Franklin and La Barbecue, opened Lewis Barbecue half a mile away. On February 9 in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, Rodney Scott, one of the most celebrated pitmasters in the world, opened Rodney Scott’s BBQ, a shiny new outpost of his original business, which is about two hours north in Hemingway. ![]() The Ringer By Danny Chau Getty Images/Ringer illustration ![]()
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