BBQ World Cup Qualifier: Mike Magill

The first thing to know about Mike Magill is that he has always taken food seriously, even when the world was not ready for it. As a boy, his parents took him to a good steakhouse, and while the rest of the table remembered the steak, Mike remembered the escargot. He loved it so much that he walked into a McDonald's the next day and ordered a plate of it. The woman at the counter looked down at him and said they did not have that. Decades later he is still a little indignant about it, and still a foodie to his bones, the kind of man who shovels a path through a Canadian winter to reach his charcoal grill because anything cooked in the oven, as his daughters like to point out, is just oven chicken.

That obsession started at the gas grill in the backyard, where his dad set him up young enough that a family photo survives of a small Mike in an apron and chef's hat, standing guard over the barbecue. His first real job as a teenager was flipping hamburgers at Harvey's, the Canadian burger chain, and the love of cooking never left. Work later took him to Leesburg, Virginia, for a few years, and it was there, in a neighborhood full of people with smokers, that he first got his hands on an offset and learned what low and slow could do. A couple of years living in Jamaica added another shelf of flavors to draw from. Barbecue was becoming less of a hobby and more of a calling, though he would not have called it that yet.

The turn came from a search bar. Around 2015, curious and a little restless, Mike typed a question into Google and found a barbecue class taught by Myron Mixon, the five-time world champion he still names as the goat and his first real mentor. He signed up, drove down to Unadilla, Georgia, and came home with everything the class taught him and a monster of a smoker he did not strictly need. What he did next tells you who he is. He called his neighbor and friend Nick O'Donnell, asked him to put a team together, and the two of them entered a competition having never cooked four meats at once or built a single turn-in box in their lives.

That first contest, in Drayton, Ontario, in 2016, could have gone badly and instead lit the fuse. They took first place in brisket, the hardest meat in the sport, along with a fourth in chicken and a call in ribs, and finished fourth overall in a field of strangers. Mike still laughs about the rookie moment when a placing was announced and he started walking to the front for a trophy, only to be told to sit back down, that they only call up first and second. The friends and family who came to watch did not know what to expect. Neither did Mike and Nick. What they got was the one thing that hooks a competitor for good, the validation of outside judges deciding your food is worth something, and that was all they needed.

The team name they carried into that contest is older than the barbecue. When Mike was small, his parents ran through the usual parade of kid nicknames. First he was Mikey Dime Eyes, on account of his little eyes. Then he became Mikey Me Too, because whatever his brother and sister were doing, he wanted in, always me too, me too. Somewhere along the way his mother decided he could be a little mean, and the name that stuck was Mean Moe. Years later, hunting for something to call his barbecue team, Mike reached back and brought it to life. It fits and it does not, which is exactly why he loves it. Kids wander up at contests and ask which one of them is the mean one. None of them are, he tells them. They just cook mean barbecue.

Ten years in, Mean Moe's BBQ is a team of two with the gear of a small operation. Six smokers live at the house, four Gateway drums for competition, one for each meat, and two more for catering and whatever else the obsession requires, because in Mike's telling you always need another smoker. Pork is their calling card, built on the Compart Duroc they swear by, and the record has grown to match. By 2024 they had been ranked the number one KCBS team in the world among cooks who enter five contests or fewer, with a Canadian team-of-the-year season behind them and a pair of rubs, Mean Moe's Original Badass and its pork counterpart, on the shelves of local butcher shops alongside a busy corporate catering book. The losses taught as much as the wins. One weekend in Hillsboro, Ohio, their pork finished thirty-first because the room wanted it saucier than they cooked it. Two weeks later, in a town five minutes down the road, they added the sauce and the same pork jumped to second, brisket landed second, and chicken took first, right up until the ribs slid to twenty-first. Fix one problem, find another, and chase all four meats at once. That is the game, and Mike loves the chase as much as the calls.

Behind all of it is a crowded, happy kitchen. Mike and his wife Suzanne have been married 28 years and raised three daughters. Taylor finished university and is off to Australia to study law, Kaelin is training to be a nurse at Queen's University and once beat her dad for money and medals in a KCBS kids' competition, and Riley, seventeen, is deep in a stretch of eating nothing but chicken, which tests even a pitmaster's patience. When Nick comes over to prep late and his own house is going quiet, Mike's is just waking up, the girls drifting downstairs to bake chocolate chip cookies at eleven at night. His mother lives just down the road. When Mean Moe's won its ticket to Las Vegas, Mike called her from the car on the way home, and she was so thrilled she declared she would phone him before every contest from now on, reasoning that if the call worked once it should work every time. Mom, he told her, I will take it.

That ticket came at La Classique in Montreal, the What the Pork event that served as BBQ United's first Canadian qualifier, where a single spot at the BBQ World Cup was on the line. Mean Moe's took it by three hundredths of a point over Smokin' Hoggz, Bill Gillespie's crew and one of the best teams in the world, making Mike the first Canadian to punch a ticket to Las Vegas. From a backyard 40 minutes north of Toronto to a stage in Las Vegas, chasing $1,000,000, is not a straight line anyone plans. It is the kind of thing that happens to a man who just keeps signing up.

Ask him what the money would mean and the answer is not about him. In a world where a young person can barely get a footing, he says, a prize like that would go to helping his three girls stand up something of their own. He wants to show that Canadians can barbecue and that anybody willing to put themselves out there can do this, backyard cookouts to the world stage. And when they call Mean Moe's to the front in Las Vegas next April, he already knows the plan. Cue Buju Banton's "Walk Like a Champion," find whatever rhythm he can, and go collect a big check. He has been clear about that part. He wants a big check.

Sources

Mike Magill, Road to a Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt (BBQ World Cup). BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker (Grand Champion, La Classique / What the Pork, Canada). Mean Moe's BBQ. Smokin' Hoggz BBQ. Hero photo: Mike Magill headshot, BBQ World Cup pitmaster program.