He Left Asheville's Acclaim to Cook Whole Hog Back Home. Southern Living Just Named Elliott's the Best New Barbecue Joint in the South.

The best new barbecue joint in the entire South, by the reckoning of the region's biggest food magazine, sits in a corner of a brewery in Florence, South Carolina, next to the pool tables and a row of pinball machines. That is where Elliott Moss came home to cook whole hog, and it is the kind of place a fancier ranking would never expect to crown.

On Thursday, Southern Living named Elliott's BBQ Lounge the best new barbecue joint in the South for 2026, the top of a list of sixteen. The ranking was written by Robert Moss, the magazine's contributing barbecue editor and no relation to the pitmaster, who said he was not surprised at all to see the Florence spot land at number one.

A Homecoming Cooked Over Pecan Coals

Elliott Moss is a Florence native, and the barbecue he is winning for is the barbecue that raised him. He grew up on the mom-and-pop whole hog joints of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, the eastern flatlands where a pig is cooked whole and low over coals until it pulls apart, and where the smoke does most of the talking. That is the tradition he has spent his career carrying, and it is the one he finally brought back to his own hometown.

Whole hog is the hard way to cook barbecue, which is part of why so few places still do it. A single pig cooks all night over a bed of coals, tended by hand, flipped once, and pulled and chopped only when the whole animal is right rather than one convenient cut of it. The method rewards patience and punishes shortcuts, and in the Pee Dee it is less a technique than an inheritance, passed down through the kind of small joints that shaped Moss before he ever ran a kitchen of his own.

For years, though, the acclaim happened somewhere else. In 2015, Moss and a partner opened Buxton Hall Barbecue in Asheville, North Carolina, as a tribute to the Florence joints that taught him the craft, and it became one of the most celebrated barbecue rooms in the country. Moss is a two-time James Beard nominee, the kind of pedigree that could have kept him in a mountain city that loved him.

Buxton Hall was not a quiet local success either. It drew national press and a steady stream of pilgrims for the better part of a decade, the sort of restaurant that put a mountain town on the barbecue map and made Moss a name well beyond the Carolinas. Walking away from that to start over is not the obvious move, which is what makes the next chapter worth telling.

Then he came home. Buxton Hall closed in November 2023, and in March 2025 Moss moved back to Florence and opened Elliott's BBQ Lounge inside Seminar Brewing, just north of downtown. He built the operation from the pits up, and he did it in the town whose old smokehouses had shaped everything he knew about fire and hog.

The Pits Behind the Brewery

The setup is unusual, and that is part of the charm. The large space gives one corner over to pool tables and pinball machines, with Seminar's beer on tap and a full bar, so the room reads as a hangout first and a barbecue temple second. The serious cooking happens next door.

In a cookhouse built beside the brewery, Moss fires custom-made open brick pits with pecan wood burned down to glowing coals, the Pee Dee burn-barrel method that turns hardwood into a shovelful of embers before it ever touches the meat. It is slow, physical, all-night work, the opposite of a gas-fired shortcut, and it is why the whole hog tastes the way it does.

That whole hog is the headliner. Robert Moss singled out the pasture-raised whole hog, cooked Pee Dee burn barrel-style, as the top of an impressive lineup of locally rooted dishes. The same pits also turn out sweet-glazed baby back ribs, thick pork steaks, and, in a wink at the pitmaster's range, delicate smoked salmon.

The range is the tell. A cook who can run a whole hog and a fillet of salmon off the same wood fire is not just repeating what his hometown taught him, he is building on it. That is the difference between a nostalgia act and a genuinely new joint, and it is a big part of why a decades-old tradition ends up looking like the freshest thing in Southern barbecue when Moss is the one tending the coals.

From Number 36 to Number One

This is not the first time the magazine has noticed. Just months after Elliott's opened, it slid onto Southern Living's Top 50 BBQ Joints list for 2025 at number 36, a remarkable placement for a room that had barely found its footing. Landing anywhere on that list is a career milestone for most pitmasters, and Moss did it in his first year back home.

A year later he sits at the very top of the new-joints ranking, which is a steep climb even for a cook with his resume. The 2026 list was a tight field of only sixteen restaurants, so the number one slot is not a participation nod. It is a statement that the best barbecue to open in the South lately is happening in a Florence brewery.

The Carolinas Ran the Board

Elliott's did not carry the flag alone. The Carolinas dominated Thursday's ranking, with three more joints from the two states landing in the top fifteen: Bordertown BBQ in Beaufort, South Carolina at number 15, The Honey Hog in Morganton, North Carolina at number 12, and Ben's Backdraft Barbecue in Waynesville, North Carolina at number 9. Four of the sixteen best new barbecue joints in the South came out of the same two states.

That regional showing is its own kind of headline. The Carolinas have argued about barbecue with each other for two centuries, east versus west, vinegar versus tomato, and here they are sweeping a magazine's list of what is new and good. Moss's whole hog just happens to sit on top of the pile.

There is a lesson in the company he keeps on that list, too. A joint in Beaufort, one in Morganton, one in Waynesville, and Moss's in Florence are not big-city rooms with investors and publicists behind them. They are the kind of places a pitmaster builds with his own hands in a town most people drive past, which is exactly where the most interesting barbecue in the South keeps turning up.

Why the Number One Is a Homecoming Story

It would be easy to file this under another restaurant ranking and scroll on, but the shape of it is what lands. A kid learns barbecue at the smokehouses of his hometown, leaves to build something acclaimed in another state, earns the nominations and the national press, and then comes back to the same small city to cook the same whole hog. Eighteen months later the region's food bible calls it the best new barbecue anywhere in the South.

The pits are new and the ranking is fresh, but the food is old Florence, cooked the way the town's joints have always cooked it. That is what a homecoming looks like when it works, built out of pecan coals and muscle memory and a stubborn belief that the barbecue worth chasing was back home the whole time.

Sources

• Southern Living ranks Florence's Elliott's BBQ Lounge best new BBQ spot in the South (WMBF, Sept 10 2026: number one on the 2026 best-new list, Robert Moss quotes, 551 West Lucas St, list of sixteen, 2025 Top 50 at number 36, the pits and menu, Bordertown / Honey Hog / Ben's Backdraft placements)

• Buxton Hall Barbecue Brings Whole-Hog Tradition and Hash to Asheville (Our State: Elliott Moss's Florence and Pee Dee roots, two-time James Beard nominee, Buxton Hall as a tribute to Florence joints, 12-hour whole hog)

• Buxton Hall Barbecue closes (The Smoke Sheet: Buxton Hall closed November 2023)

• Elliott's BBQ Lounge (the restaurant, Florence, South Carolina)

Images courtesy Elliott's BBQ Lounge and Southern Living.