Joe Pearce: Slap's BBQ Pitmaster and BBQ World Cup Qualifier

Joe Pearce and his older brother Mike found barbecue on the same afternoon, and neither one knew the other was doing it.

Joe was at his house wrapping a brisket when Mike called just to catch up, and Joe told him he had to run, he had a brisket on. Mike said, what do you mean, I am cooking a pork butt right now.

Two brothers from Kansas City, on the same Saturday, standing over two different smokers, chasing the same thing without a word between them.

That phone call is where Slap's BBQ really begins, and more than a decade and over 350 contests later, it is where a road to Las Vegas and a shot at $1,000,000 begins too.

How Joe Pearce Got Into Competition BBQ in Kansas City

Pearce grew up in Kansas City, the self-proclaimed barbecue capital of the world, and he took the title personally.

His tagline, born, bred, and barbecue fed in the Midwest, is less a slogan than a biography.

He grew up camping and cooking outside, playing with fire the way Midwestern boys do, and he learned the indoor half from a big Italian family where his mom, his grandma, and his aunt ran every holiday.

Christmas was Italian, Thanksgiving was turkey, Easter leaned Italian again, and to this day Pearce makes meatballs with no recipe, going by smell, because when it smells right, the meatball is right.

His first real barbecue memory is his eighth birthday, when all he wanted was to cook dinner himself. He asked for barbecue chicken, soaked a pile of legs in sauce, and burned them over the grill with his dad's help.

He had no idea what he was doing. Everyone ate it anyway.

The obsession arrived in his late twenties.

Pearce was working as a technical creative arts director at a church, a job with odd hours and enough free mornings to fall down a rabbit hole, and he chose barbecue. He bought a smoker off Craigslist and started tinkering.

Then came the phone call with Mike, the brisket and the pork butt, and the two of them decided to buy a smoker together and see what these barbecue contests were about.

Their first one sat ten minutes from where the restaurant stands now, over St. Patrick's Day weekend near Joe's birthday. They showed up like they were moving in, a truck bed and a fourteen-foot trailer and a conversion van full of gear and wrought-iron furniture, and built a fire pit out of pavers behind a bowling alley.

Joe barely slept for three days, drank almost no water, finished twenty-first in pork out of eighty or ninety teams, and needed a week to recover.

He was hooked. Two weeks later, at their second contest ever, Slap's finished second overall.

That was all it took. They had found what they were going to do for the rest of their lives.

Why Joe Pearce Is Called TV Joe

Television came before the restaurant.

A crew filming Destination America's BBQ Pitmasters wandered past their tent at a contest in Lee's Summit, liked the team name, and asked Joe to send an audition tape. Months later a producer called from New York needing it in forty-eight hours.

Instead of the one-minute video he was asked for, Pearce used the lights and cameras from his church job and turned in a seven-minute dissertation on the history of Kansas City barbecue, storyboarded across a butcher shop, a rooftop over the river, and his own kitchen, scored with music built to tug at the producers.

It worked.

Slap's made the show, reached the finale, and came up just short in a winner-take-all final that paid nothing for second.

Pearce walked off with a hat and a nickname. On the circuit he is TV Joe now, the guy who is a little too good on camera, and he wears it with a grin.

Why the Team Is Called Slap's BBQ

The name is its own small saga.

Before they were Slap's, they were Squeal Like a Pig, the least offensive option in a very long, very vulgar group text of team-name ideas. They liked the pig-squeal joke and did not clock the movie reference until later. The initials spelled S.L.A.P.S., so on the circuit they started shortening it.

The real christening came in a Tampa airport at a quarter to seven in the morning, the day after they lost that Pitmasters final, tired and cranky and eating breakfast at the only open Chili's.

Joe and Mike, four years apart and both certain they are never wrong, were going back and forth about whether it should be Slap or Slaps, singular or plural and possessive, their voices climbing the way brothers' voices do.

A woman finally walked over, said she worked in marketing and would settle it, slammed her hand flat on the table, said Slaps, and walked away.

That was that.

When they opened the restaurant and every letter on the sign cost seventy-five dollars, the short name paid for itself again. The original pig logo still rides on the back of their shirts.

Slap's BBQ in Kansas City, Kansas: The Restaurant and the Record

Slap's BBQ opened in 2014 on Central Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas, a room that is small in size but big in footprint and sells out of burnt ends and ribs most days.

Pearce runs it with Mike and their mom, Francine, the catering director, and he jokes that they operate somewhere between a mom-and-pop and a company that doubles as a payday-loan and used-car outfit, because every employee needs a little help and they are happy to give it.

The food built a reputation fast. Slap's is now one of Kansas City's most decorated competition teams, known for burnt ends Pearce calls meat marshmallows, soft and succulent with just enough crust.

The trophies stacked up alongside the restaurant: back-to-back reserve finishes for KCBS Team of the Year in 2020 and 2021, world titles in chicken, and a run of more than 350 contests that puts him among the most consistent cooks of his generation.

He was even named the runner-up in a worldwide barbecue field, the second-best cook in the world on that particular day.

What Pearce will tell you, though, is that he has never won the biggest one.

He finished second at the Jack, he says, and third at the American Royal, his hometown's world series of barbecue, in a year he posted two perfect scores and a single bad rib turn knocked him off the top.

He once lost a Team of the Year race by a single point and drove fourteen hours home in silence, alone with his own thoughts, which he now admits was probably a bad idea.

He has won categories at the sport's biggest contests and can fairly call himself a world champion of a kind, but the outright, name-on-the-trophy major has stayed just out of reach. That gap is exactly why the BBQ World Cup means what it does to him.

His favorite win is proof of the stubbornness the sport rewards.

At a contest in Smithville, Missouri, on a lake beneath a dam, a storm front collided with the wind coming off the water and his offset smoker simply would not climb past a hundred degrees.

He sat next to it, sweating in a hoodie, close to tears, ready to pack up and drive home. Then he did the only thing left.

He shoved the meat into the firebox itself, a steel box running close to a thousand degrees, and cooked his ribs and chicken right on top of the coals. He took first in chicken with a perfect score, second in ribs, and won the contest outright.

He still teaches the lesson in his competition classes: you never let the smoker decide what happens to the food. You do.

Joe Pearce's Family and His Plan for $1,000,000

Barbecue has always been a family operation for the Pearces.

Mike, four years older and, as Joe tells it, blessed with an attention to detail that runs light-years ahead of his own, is the micro to Joe's macro, the brother who once spent two and a half hours turning every parsley leaf in a competition box the same direction.

Their dad, Jim, taught them the fire. Their mom, grandma, and aunt taught them the kitchen.

Joe's wife and daughter hold down the home front that lets him cook every weekend, and he still thinks about his grandmother, who passed the same week as one of their earliest contests and never got to see how far the passion she helped plant would travel.

Asked for three words his family would use for him, he lands on passionate, confident, and caring.

Slap's punched its ticket to Las Vegas as Reserve Grand Champion at Smoke in the Spring this past April, one of the early names on the board, and Joe already knows who is riding shotgun: Mike, of course, big brother and the best cook he knows.

He is honest about what the moment would do to him. He wears his emotions on his sleeve on contest days, and standing on that stage as a finalist would probably break him open a little, because it would mean he finally landed the major that has eluded him against the best cooks of his generation.

Ask what he would do with $1,000,000 and the answer is pure Joe. Pay off the house, then buy something cool, a car or a watch, and take everyone to a beach with a cold drink in his hand.

He has his walkout song picked, too. When they call Slap's BBQ to the stage next April, cue "We Are the Champions."

Sources

Joe Pearce, Road to 1 Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt (BBQ World Cup). BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker: Reserve Grand Champion, Smoke in the Spring.

About Us, Slap's BBQ (team origin, Squeal Like a Pig, BBQ Pitmasters, restaurant opened 2014).

Best Competition BBQ: Slap's BBQ, Kansas City Magazine.

Joe Pearce of Slap's BBQ: 2020 & 2021 KCBS Team of the Year Reserve Champion, BBQ Radio Network.

KCK pitmaster named second-best in worldwide competition, FOX4 Kansas City.