BBQ World Cup Qualifier: Darren Warth

Darren Warth has won just about everything competition barbecue can hand a person, and he found his way to all of it while trying to figure out how to smoke deer sausage. That is the kind of story Warth tells on himself, because the long road from a small-town Iowa kitchen to a stage in Las Vegas was never a straight line. It was a series of dots that only made sense looking back.

Warth grew up in a southeast Iowa town of twelve hundred people, a self-described farm boy who shoveled hog manure on one uncle's farm and learned to cook sitting on his mother's kitchen counter. Every Christmas of his childhood came with a new cookbook. Cooking was simply part of the family. He left for Iowa State planning to become an architect, lasted a single year in design college, switched to a finance degree, and met his wife Sherry there. By twenty-seven he was a vice president of logistics for a national transportation management company, a good job that rang his phone around the clock and never quite let go.

Competition barbecue started as the escape from that phone. Around 2003, hunting for a way to smoke deer sausage, Warth stumbled onto an early internet message board called the Barbecue Forum and started asking questions. The people answering turned out to be competition cooks, and their world pulled him in. He still keeps a binder of recipes printed off those forum pages. That thread led him to the American Royal, the biggest open contest in the sport, and to a decision most people ease into that he made all at once: no backyard division, straight into the full professional ranks.

His very first contest nearly ended the whole thing before it began. In Sedalia, Missouri, brand new to the sport with a fresh pit and pop-up tents, Warth cooked through a night of rain and hail and then an eighty-five mile-per-hour downburst that flattened his tents onto the pit and twisted the judging tent to the ground. He wanted to pack up and go home. Sherry told him to put on his big-boy pants and finish. So the family opened the back doors of their Suburban and did the turn-ins four inches deep in mud, and two top-ten calls came out of that swamp in a field of more than fifty teams. That was all it took. He was, in his words, addicted to this crazy sport.

The team name came a few years and a few restaurants later. From 2003 to 2008 Warth competed as the Smoking Clones, a nod to his days as the first Iowa State tailgater in the parking lot every home game. When he and Sherry opened a catering business and then a restaurant, they needed a name that would feed Hawkeye fans too, so Sherry landed on Smokey D's: big D for Darren, little S for Sherry. A South Carolina team already held the name, so on the circuit they became Iowa's Smokey D's, and they have been that ever since.

Smokey D's grew into a small empire out of Des Moines. Two barbecue restaurants, one seating four hundred and a smaller room downtown, sit alongside a breakfast spot named It's My Jam Cafe and a ghost kitchen Warth started during COVID called the Crafty Mac and the Ornry Chicken. Five restaurants, four locations, and a heavy catering operation, and he still runs thirty-five to forty competitions a year. He rises at 3:45 every morning, seven days a week, does not drink, and does not gamble.

Along the way, Warth built the record that earned him the nickname other cooks gave him. He is a three-time champion of the American Royal, with two reserve finishes on top of that, including a 2006 loss by four ten-thousandths of a point in only his third year of cooking. In October 2014 he won the Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational, walking the aisle in Lynchburg with his mother and sisters beside him while the room played "We Are the Champions." He has a Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo world championship and a Kingsford Invitational win he cooked on the deck of an aircraft carrier in New York. All told, Smokey D's has banked more than ninety state championships and a thousand awards. In 2023 the sport made it official and inducted Warth into the American Royal Barbecue Hall of Fame. In barbecue circles he answers to one nickname now. They call him the GOAT.

He qualified for the BBQ World Cup at the Lakeland Pigfest in Florida, finishing Reserve Grand Champion and punching one of the first tickets to Las Vegas. True to how he sees the sport, he spent part of that same day helping the cook in the next stall, a competitor up from the backyard division who was unsure how far to push a brisket. Warth, an open book by his own description, talked him through it, the younger man returned the favor on ribs, and both of them ended up qualifying. That is the part he wanted on the record. He no longer competes to win, he says, having won nearly all of it already. What keeps him driving to contests is the walk to the stage, the friends, and the camaraderie in the dirt lot at dawn.

Sherry is the constant through all of it, the person he kisses in every world-championship photo when the name gets called. She comes to the fun contests and skips the muddy ones, and Warth has a standing rule that she can bail on any trip right up until he pulls out of the driveway, no hard feelings, because he has always known how to cook alone. For Las Vegas the plan is the same as it has always been. Big D, little S.

Ask Warth what he would do with the money and the answer is quick. He and Sherry, he says, have given away every cent competition barbecue has ever paid them, funneling it to causes like Pinky Swear for pediatric cancer and to juvenile diabetes charities, and sponsoring contests without asking for the credit. A million dollars would go the same way. For a Hall of Famer with nothing left to prove, the prize was never the point. The barbecue is. When they call the GOAT to the stage in Las Vegas next April, he already has his walkout song picked. Cue "Sweet Caroline."

Sources

Darren Warth, Road to 1 Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt (BBQ World Cup). BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker (Reserve Grand Champion, Lakeland Pigfest). WeAreIowa: 2023 American Royal Barbecue Hall of Fame induction. BroadwayWorld: Smokey D's wins the World Series of BBQ (American Royal Open). Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Grand Champion, October 25, 2014, Lynchburg, TN. Smokey D's BBQ, About. Hero photo: Darren Warth headshot, BBQ World Cup pitmaster program.