Southern Living Gathered Five Pitmasters Shaping Barbecue's Future. Most of Them Cook the Oldest Way There Is.

On Sunday, one of the country's biggest food magazines did something it almost never does. Rather than rank barbecue joints from a distance, Southern Living gathered five pitmasters in a single field and set their fires side by side. The event was called Luncheon with Legends. It ran from 11 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon at the Hunter Farm in Weddington, North Carolina, south of Charlotte, and nearly every plate that came off the line was cooked over live wood.

The five were not a random sampling. They are the cooks that Robert Moss, Southern Living's contributing barbecue editor, points to when he talks about where Southern barbecue is going. Lewis Donald drove down from Charlotte. Hector Garate came from Charleston. Evan LeRoy flew in from Austin. Elliott Moss made the trip from Florence, South Carolina. Zach Parker closed his shack on a two-lane highway outside Lexington, Tennessee, to be there. Line their stories up and something surprising comes into view. The future of Southern barbecue, by the reckoning of the region's biggest food magazine, looks a great deal like its deepest past.

A luncheon built to name a direction

Southern Living has spent years ranking barbecue. It publishes a Top 50, a best-in-every-state map, and an annual list of the best new joints. A luncheon is a different kind of statement. This one was presented with the Charlotte Regional Visitor's Authority and priced at 175 dollars a seat, with tastings from all five pitmasters alongside oysters, sides, and dessert on a working farm.

The person who chose the guest list is the reason it carries weight. Robert Moss is not only an editor. He is a barbecue historian who has written books on how the food moved across the South, so his picks read less like a leaderboard and more like an argument about direction. When Moss seats five cooks at one table and calls them legends, he is saying these are the hands the tradition is safe in.

One table, one live fire

The through-line at that table was fire itself. Four of the five build their barbecue over live coals or open wood, and whole hog, the hardest and oldest method in the Southern canon, runs straight through the group. A whole pig cooks all night over a bed of embers, tended by hand, flipped once, and pulled only when the entire animal is right rather than one convenient cut of it. It is slow, physical work that rewards patience and punishes shortcuts, and it is the thing several of these cooks have organized their lives around.

That is the quiet tension in the magazine's pick. Southern Living is naming the future, and the future keeps reaching backward, to burn barrels and open pits and the kind of all-night cooking most restaurants gave up decades ago. The five did not arrive there the same way, though, which is what makes the group worth knowing one cook at a time.

The whole-hog keepers

Elliott Moss is the pitmaster Southern Living has been loudest about lately. A Florence, South Carolina native raised on the Pee Dee region's whole-hog joints, he first made his name away from home, opening Buxton Hall Barbecue in Asheville in 2015 and turning it into one of the most celebrated barbecue rooms in the country. He is a two-time James Beard nominee. Then he walked away from it. Buxton Hall closed in November 2023, and in March 2025 Moss moved home and opened Elliott's BBQ Lounge inside a Florence brewery, firing custom brick pits with pecan coals burned down the old Pee Dee way. This month the magazine named Elliott's the best new barbecue joint in the entire South for 2026.

Zach Parker carries an even older line. His shop, B.E. Scott's BBQ in Lexington, Tennessee, was started in 1962 by a local named B.E. Scott, bought by the legendary West Tennessee pitmaster Ricky Parker, and handed to Ricky's son Zach in 2013 after his father died. Zach was a young man when a whole-hog institution became his overnight, and he kept the method exactly as it was. B.E. Scott's still cooks twenty to twenty-five whole hogs a week, close to a full day on the pit for each one, and the Saturday cook routinely sells out by early afternoon. In a region where whole hog is quietly vanishing, Parker is one of the young cooks holding the line.

The builders

Evan LeRoy comes at the tradition from the other direction. He and Sawyer Lewis started LeRoy and Lewis as an Austin food trailer in March 2017, built around what they call new-school barbecue: beef cheeks instead of only brisket, house-made sausages, and a rotating board of ideas most Texas joints would never try. It worked. The trailer earned a Michelin star in 2024, grew into a 150-seat brick-and-mortar, and put LeRoy on the 2025 James Beard semifinalist list for Best Chef in Texas. His barbecue is invention stacked on top of a live fire, not a break from it.

Hector Garate brings wood-fired, whole-animal cooking to Charleston. He runs Palmira Barbecue in West Ashley, a place he named for his grandmother and the cattle ranch she grew up on. Garate built his own offset smoker, sources meat from a handful of regional farms, and turns beef cheeks, brisket, whole hog, and house sausage off an open fire. His climb has been fast enough that he has already moved from the pit to television. Palmira reads as a polished Charleston restaurant and a live-fire pit at the same time, which is exactly the blend Moss keeps pointing at.

Lewis Donald was the host, in a sense, since the luncheon landed in his own backyard. He runs Sweet Lew's BBQ in Charlotte, where he brings a trained chef's discipline to plain Carolina barbecue, and he founded the Carolina BBQ Festival to put his city's cooks on a bigger stage. Donald is the connective figure of the group, a pitmaster as comfortable building a community around the fire as tending it.

Why the future keeps looking like the past

Put the five together and Southern Living's bet becomes clear. The magazine is not saying barbecue's next chapter belongs to gadgets, or gas, or the fastest possible cook. It is saying the opposite. The cooks it trusts with the word legend are the ones doing the hard, slow, hand-tended version: whole hogs over coals, offset smokers they welded themselves, all-night fires in towns most people drive past without slowing down.

What looks like the future, then, is really a return. Two of these pitmasters inherited whole-hog traditions and refused to let them die. One rebuilt his hometown's method from the pits up. One turned Texas technique loose without ever leaving the live fire. One brought a chef's mind to Carolina barbecue and then built a festival around it. Five different roads, one destination, and the destination is older than any of them.

That is what a farm table outside Charlotte was showing off on Sunday. Not a ranking, but a direction. The best barbecue the South has going is being cooked the way it always was, by hand, over wood, by people who believe the old way is still the right one. The magazine simply gave it a table and called it the future.

Sources

Southern Living, Charlotte pitmaster team up for local barbecue event (AOL / The Charlotte Observer): the Luncheon with Legends event, Sept 20 2026 at the Hunter Farm in Weddington, the Charlotte Regional Visitor's Authority partnership, the 175-dollar tickets, and the five pitmasters named by Robert Moss.

Southern Living ranks Florence's Elliott's BBQ Lounge best new BBQ spot in the South (WMBF): Robert Moss as contributing barbecue editor, Elliott Moss's Florence roots and Elliott's BBQ Lounge.

Buxton Hall Barbecue in Asheville (Our State) and Buxton Hall closes (The Smoke Sheet): Elliott Moss's Pee Dee background, two-time James Beard nominee, and Buxton Hall's 2015 opening and November 2023 close.

This Pitmaster Is Preserving West Tennessee's Whole-Hog Tradition (Texas Monthly) and Zach Parker, B.E. Scott's BBQ (Kevin's BBQ Joints): the 1962 founding, the Ricky Parker lineage, the 2013 handover, and the twenty to twenty-five whole hogs a week.

LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue (Wikipedia): the March 2017 trailer, new-school menu, 2024 Michelin star, brick-and-mortar, and Evan LeRoy's 2025 James Beard semifinalist nod.

Palmira Barbecue (about) and Palmira's Hector Garate takes his talents to the small screen (Charleston City Paper): the grandmother's ranch namesake, the self-built smoker, and Garate's move to television.

Inside Sweet Lew's (Unpretentious Palate) and Carolina BBQ Festival founder Lewis Donald (The Low and Slow Barbecue Show): Sweet Lew's chef-driven Carolina barbecue and Donald founding the Carolina BBQ Festival.

Image credits: courtesy the pitmasters and their restaurants, credited per slide.