BBQ World Cup Qualifier: Click & Q

Before Joris Nies cooks a single piece of meat, he picks up his tongs and clicks them. Click, click. It is a small thing, a habit really, but it is also the whole idea behind his team's name, and it is the sound of a barbecue journey that has moved faster than almost anyone's in the sport. Three years ago Joris and his crew were running virtual barbecue contests out of a Facebook group during lockdown. This coming April they will travel to Las Vegas, Joris among them stepping onto an airplane for the first time in his life, as the only Belgian team on the road to the BBQ World Cup, cooking against ninety-nine of the best teams on earth for $1,000,000.

The Win in Boom

They earned the trip at home. It happened at Het Belgisch Barbecue Weekend in Boom, a town in Belgium's Antwerp province and the site of the country's only BBQ World Cup qualifier. On May 22, in a field of thirteen KCBS teams, Click & Q finished Grand Champion with 687.93 points, ahead of Just Wing It BBQ Team and The Antwerp Smokers. One weekend, one Belgian ticket to Las Vegas, and it went to a team that had been cooking seriously for barely three years.

A Plumber and an Open Fire

For most of his life Joris was a backyard cook, a plumber by trade who liked good food and an open fire. His first real taste of competition barbecue came six or seven years ago, before COVID, when he started wandering the handful of contests that Belgium and its neighbors were beginning to host. He would talk to the cooks, study what they were doing, and think to himself that he really liked this.

Then the pandemic shut everything down, and barbecue found a workaround. On Facebook, a Belgian BBQ group set up virtual KCBS contests. Cooks would register, fire up at home, and run a full twenty-four-hour competition timeline against ten or fifteen others, turning in their entries on the same clock as everyone else. Joris did one, then another. That is where the bug got him. What began as a way to pass a locked-down weekend became the thing he could not stop thinking about.

He and his friend Gert decided to learn it properly. They found Birger, a pitmaster who ran a Weber Academy in Belgium, and signed up for a two-day KCBS masterclass to get the fundamentals down. From there they taught themselves the rest, studying videos, testing cook after cook, and doing something most weekend cooks never think to do. They invited certified judges into the backyard to taste the food before contests and tell them the truth. Too salty. Too heavy. Fix the presentation. Joris even went and earned his own KCBS judge credentials, so he could hear what the judges at the table were really listening for.

Click, Click: The Name

The name came from that same backyard, from a habit Joris noticed in himself and in nearly everyone else who cooks. Pick up a pair of barbecue tongs and the first thing you do is test them. Click, click. "You click, and then you go to the Q," he says, laying out the little superstition like a law of physics. Click and Cue. Skip the click and something is bound to go wrong. It sits on their logo now, a wink at a ritual so common that Joris is convinced most cooks do it without ever noticing.

Three Men Who Think Alike

Click & Q is really three men who think alike. Gert, who is forty and lives in the same corner of Belgium, is the one who pulled Joris into competition in the first place five years ago and helped start the team, and he takes the lead on pork, ribs, and butt. A third teammate, Leonard, handles the chicken. Joris keeps the brisket for himself. What makes it work, he says, is that the three of them taste the same thing and reach the same verdict. "Our nose is always in the same direction," is how he puts it. On a lot of teams three cooks means three opinions, one calling it too dark, another too soft. On this one, when the food is right, they all know it at once, and they seal it with a look and a fist bump.

The win in Boom was sweeter because the ground there had been so unkind. For the first two of their three years, Click & Q went to the Belgisch Barbecue Weekend and came away with nothing, until it became a running joke that the site was cursed for them. This year they drove in telling themselves to just make the best of it and see what happened. Then the calls started coming, category after category, and the other teams sitting nearby began ribbing them, telling Joris to get ready because he was about to be the Grand Champion. He laughed it off. An hour later he was jumping.

Brisket is where the team has won most of its trophies, and it is the meat Joris trusts himself with when it counts. But the very first trophy Click & Q ever brought home was chicken, at a Vuur en Vlees contest, and it is the one he still mentions first. Doing all four categories well on the same day is hard, he admits, which is a good part of what keeps him chasing it.

Ask Joris who the greatest of all time is and he does not hesitate. It is Heath Riles, the Mississippi cook whose rubs and results are known even in Belgium. "They know him in America too," he says, as if that settles why the pick is obvious, and when he is asked to name a dream cooking partner, it is Riles again. It is a small window into how this works. Riles will be cooking at the BBQ World Cup, which means the man Joris admires most in the sport will be in the same field, a few tents away. That is the culture Click & Q fell for during a locked-down spring, a sport where an amateur from Belgium can chase his hero across an ocean and end up cooking beside him.

A Shared Calendar, and Vegas

Barbecue in this family is a shared calendar. Joris has a seven-year-old son and a partner, Cindy, who is at nearly every contest, ready to cook and to help with whatever the day needs, and Gert's wife travels with the team too. Two Belgian sponsors have carried them through these three years, and Joris names them with real gratitude: ElkeDagBarbecue.be for rubs and sauce, and an online meat market, MeatMarketOnline, for the quality cuts he says you need if you want to be a Grand Champion. He is already hoping both will find a way to make the trip to Las Vegas.

Shannon told him he is part of the inaugural top one hundred, the first cohort of the first BBQ World Cup, and for a team that qualified in a field of thirteen in a small country, being one of a hundred from around the world is its own kind of arrival. It is also the farthest Joris has ever been from home. He has never been to America. He has never been on an airplane. In Belgium, he says, they have a phrase for a thing like this. The American dream. He talks about the trip with equal parts nerves and wonder, a man with a lot of questions and no intention of missing the answer. If the $1,000,000 ever landed, the plan is simple and a little tender: help his family, and maybe buy the team a bigger smoker. And when Click & Q's name gets called and Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" comes over the speakers, do not expect a quiet walk to the stage. Joris and his teammates will link arms, throw the fist bump, and let out the Flemish victory cry they have been saving for exactly this. Oepsembakkes.

Sources

Joris Nies, Click & Q, Road to 1 Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt (BBQ World Cup). Interview conducted in Flemish and English; Flemish passages translated for this article.

BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker: Grand Champion, Belgisch Barbecue Weekend, Belgium (team #6, Click & Q, head cook Joris Nies).

KCBS results, Het Belgisch Barbecue Weekend (7th Edition), Boom, Antwerp, Belgium, May 22, 2026: Click & Q Grand Champion, 687.93 points, 13-team field.

BBQ United team profile (member-written): Click & Q, Belgium; founded 2023; sanctioning body KCBS; favorite categories brisket, pork, ribs, chicken; sponsors ElkeDagBarbecue.be and MeatMarketOnline; Instagram @clickandq.

Meet the Field: Every Team Qualified for the BBQ World Cup, BBQ United.

Photo: Click & Q.