Blane Hunter: Porky Butts BBQ Owner and BBQ World Cup Qualifier

Before Blane Hunter owned a restaurant, before the trophies and the television and the Grand Champion titles, he was a five-year-old in Houston hauling wood and scraping grease out of his father's smokers. His dad built pits and cooked the little league and rodeo cookoffs around town, and Blane grew up doing every miserable job that came with them. He tells it as some of the best memories he has.

Four decades later, that kid owns Porky Butts BBQ in Omaha, Nebraska, and in April of 2027 he is taking it to Las Vegas, where 100 teams from around the world will cook for $1,000,000.

Cooking was never a side interest for Blane, it was the whole plan. After a Houston childhood spent tending his father's fires and grilling seafood down at the beach, he went to culinary school, then worked his way through kitchens in Rhode Island and Wisconsin and a stretch as a corporate chef. He has been in the food business, in one form or another, since he was thirteen.

What he did not have, for a long time, was any interest in competing. That took a friend.

Why the Team Is Called Porky Butts BBQ

In 2013 a good friend named Rod, a guy who mostly wanted an excuse to get out and party, talked Blane into cooking a contest with him near home, in Valley, Nebraska. There were forty-some teams. They landed somewhere in the middle of the pack and did not get a single call, and that, oddly, is what hooked him.

If he had gotten a call, Blane says, he might have been satisfied and never gone back. Instead he was addicted.

He signed up for the next one, then eight more, then thirteen the year after.

The team name came from Rod too, who had christened it Porky Butts before Blane ever took the thing seriously. When Blane took over and threatened to start his own team, the deal was simple: he could keep the name, but Rod could never be kicked off it.

So Rod remains the original Porky to this day, and Blane is just Mr. Porky.

How Blane Hunter Went From Hobby Cook to KCBS Team of the Year

The addiction turned into a career fast. By 2016 he was cooking thirty-nine contests a year and took KCBS Team of the Year along with Rib Team of the Year. In 2017 he won the American Royal Open, the granddaddy of the sport.

Across his career the numbers stack up to more than 130 contests, 85 top-ten finishes, and 22 Grand Champion titles in nine different states.

His brother, who has always played mentor and pusher, told him he had to capitalize on the momentum, so in 2019 Blane signed a cheap two-year lease on a restaurant, figuring he could always walk away after two years and go back to what he was doing.

He is still there. The restaurants run him now, he jokes, but cooking meat over open fire is the only thing he has ever really wanted to do.

How Blane Hunter's Omaha Restaurant Gives Him an Edge

Running a barbecue restaurant turns out to be a competitive advantage most cooks do not have.

In a single week, Blane's restaurant went through 850 racks of ribs, and he buys brisket by the hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, so he sees more meat in a month than most teams see in years. He can read a kill date at a glance and has even tipped off Darren Warth about when a good allotment of briskets is coming through.

Ask him for advice and he does not talk about pits or rubs, he talks about sourcing. Start with a bad piece of meat and you will finish with a bad piece of meat, he says, and the beginning and the end of the process are where most people lose.

The same culinary streak shows up on his menu, right down to a polarizing potato salad, all dehydrated mustard and tarragon and a horseradish bite, that older Nebraska gentlemen love to tell him is terrible while the restaurant sells 800 pounds of it a week.

Blane Hunter's Proudest BBQ Moment: His Son Gavin's Win

For a man with an American Royal title, the proudest thing that ever happened to Blane in barbecue was not his own.

Years ago at a contest in Chicago, his son Gavin, still a kid, entered the adult backyard division and cooked it solo against roughly forty grown teams. He took second in ribs, second in chicken, and Grand Champion overall, beating a field of, in Blane's words, a bunch of pissed-off grown men.

Darren Warth filmed the whole thing.

Blane would take that day over winning the Royal, no contest, for the look on his son's face and the fact that Gavin still talks about it. It is the answer he gives without having to think.

Blane Hunter's Father, Family and Teammates

The person Blane most wishes could see Las Vegas is the one who put him next to a fire in the first place.

His father, a proud Marine who built those Houston pits, passed away a few years ago, and he was the first phone call Blane made after every contest for years.

Now Blane cooks every single competition wearing his dad's wedding ring and his military dog tags, and he will have them on in Las Vegas, the way he says his father cooks every one of them with him.

His son Gavin, turning twenty-one right around the event, has taken over as the straight-shooter on the other end of the phone, the one who will tell Blane his food was off when it was off.

And his best friend Eric, the teammate at every major he has ever won, will be at the pit beside him on the World Cup stage.

What Blane Hunter Would Do With $1,000,000

Blane admits he has not let himself think much about the money, because he would rather focus on getting to the final and giving himself a shot at the big trophy, the gaudier the better.

But pressed on it, he lands where he always does, on other people. He would put something back into his employees, who he says helped get him here, and the rest would go where the next several years are already spending it: his daughter is aiming for medical school and his son is in college. He grew up dirt poor, which is exactly why, if they call Porky Butts BBQ to that stage, he wants to walk out to Drake's Started From the Bottom.

Expect a scream, a jump, and quite possibly the shirt coming off.

The kid who scraped grease out of his father's pits will be standing on a stage in Las Vegas, cooking for $1,000,000, with his dad's dog tags around his neck.

Sources

Blane Hunter, Road to 1 Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt (BBQ World Cup). BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker (Porky Butts BBQ; Grand Champion, Scheel's Home and Hardware North Dakota BBQ event; Omaha, Nebraska). Kevin's BBQ Joints profile and Porky Butts BBQ official site (2016 KCBS Team of the Year and Rib Team of the Year; 2017 American Royal Open; more than 130 contests, 85 top-ten finishes, 22 Grand Champion titles in nine states; restaurant opened 2019; Snake River Farms briskets). Family detail (father a Marine, wedding ring and dog tags worn on every cook; son Gavin's backyard-division win; teammate Eric; friend Rod and the team-name origin) from the qualifier interview. Hero photo: Blane Hunter, BBQ World Cup pitmaster program.