BBQ World Cup Qualifier: Nate Benson

Nate Benson was twelve years old and convinced his mother was torturing him. Her rule was simple and, to a boy in American Fork, Utah, entirely unreasonable: one dinner a week, cooked by him, start to finish, no exceptions. The early results were not encouraging. There was a box of Kraft macaroni that never stood a chance and an aluminum pot he boiled dry and ruined. He hated every minute of it. What he could not have known, standing over that scorched pot, was that his mother had just handed him the one thing that would carry him all the way to Las Vegas. She had, in his words, thrown him in the deep end and refused to bail him out.

A Plate of Pulled Pork With No Sauce

It took a long time to look like a gift. Benson grew into a capable cook, helped along by a grandmother whose own mother came from Atlanta and brought a little southern taste and technique into the family kitchen. But barbecue itself stayed foreign to him well into adulthood. The only version he had ever met was smothered in sauce, and he did not care for it. Then, around the age of thirty, a friend named Fidel Astorga handed him a plate of pulled pork with no sauce on it at all. It was, simply, the best thing he had eaten. That plate rearranged everything. Benson made it his mission to learn barbecue, bought a small electric smoker he still describes as looking like a broken mini fridge, and started tinkering.

The tinkering turned serious fast. In 2017 a friend mentioned a backyard competition a couple of weeks out. Benson took the chicken, his neighbor took the ribs, and among ten or twelve teams he walked away with second place in chicken. That was all it took. He was hooked from the very first one, and nine years later he has never really stopped, cooking somewhere between twenty and twenty-five weekends a year on top of a full-time job programming data feeds for a benefits company.

How Uncle Jesse Got His Name

The name came from an old joke that outlived the friend who started it. Everyone knows him as Nate, but his given first name is Jesse. A buddy, Leif Nelson, took to calling him Uncle Jesse, insisting he was the spitting image of the character from The Dukes of Hazzard. Benson is careful to specify which Uncle Jesse he means, the good-natured Dukes of Hazzard one, not the Full House version. The nickname stuck, then it spread, and eventually it stopped being a joke and became a business. Uncle Jesse's BBQ was born out of a friend's teasing, and Benson has leaned all the way into it. "We love it," he says.

The Willingness to Swing

What separates a good barbecue cook from a great one, in Benson's telling, is nothing more mysterious than experience, the ability to bring each cut of meat to exactly the right point and not a minute past it. His own signature is brisket, the cut he reaches for when he wants to stand out, but the more revealing thing about him is a restless streak that will not leave a rulebook alone. He likes to push boundaries and do things differently, and it has cut both ways. At a Famous Dave's All-Star wild card round in Las Vegas, told to cook whatever he wanted, he plated a surf and turf of tomahawk ribeye and octopus and won the whole thing. At a world-title rib competition, he tried a fried rib that landed, by his own cheerful accounting, somewhere around ninety-ninth out of a hundred. He knew going in it might go over like a lead balloon. He cooked it anyway. That is the part worth holding onto: the willingness to swing.

The confidence to swing came from a day in Oklahoma. A friend, Will Collier, invited him to a memorial invitational, and Benson showed up expecting an ordinary contest. Instead he walked into a room stacked with world champions, Mark Lambert among them, and froze. Eight or nine of the best cooks alive were standing around, and his first thought was a very human what am I doing here. The event ran two turns. The first did not go well. On the second he finished third, a single point off first place, and the starstruck feeling finally broke. Maybe, he let himself think, I do belong here. He has cooked like someone who belongs ever since.

Adapt and Overcome

None of it happens alone, and Benson would be the first to say so. His wife Miriam is his rock and his loudest cheerleader, the one who lets him wallow for exactly one minute after a bad result and then tells him to get up and get going. She is also, on the individual circuit, his opponent, cooking against him under the same roof and giving no quarter. Their shared mantra, worn smooth from use, is adapt and overcome. The competing runs in the family. Their fifteen-year-old daughter Allie entered a seafood competition against a field of adults, plated a crab cake, and took fourth, close enough that her father genuinely thought she might beat him. He calls it a proud daddy moment and means every word. Beyond the household there is a whole second family, the friends and fellow cooks, Steve Conaway and Sean Rapier and Leif Nelson, who keep him steady and keep him humble. Barbecue, Benson says, is the family you choose.

That generosity is not a talking point for him, it is the whole point. Ask what he wants people to remember and he does not reach for a trophy. He talks about being an open book, about answering every question honestly, about helping a competitor to their best day. "We want to beat you," he says, "but we want to beat you on your best day." He would rather lose to someone he helped than win because they faltered.

Almost His Backyard

All of that groundwork paid off at the Slab-O-Rama Barbeque Challenge in Bullhead City, one of the very first stops on the road to Las Vegas back in January, where Benson took Reserve Grand Champion and punched his ticket into the field headed to the BBQ World Cup. The timing feels almost unfair to the rest of the country. The finale runs in Las Vegas in 2027 for a prize of $1,000,000, and Las Vegas sits about four and a half hours from Benson's front door. It is, he points out, almost his backyard.

He is clear-eyed about what actually pulls him there, and it is not the money. "The million dollar is great," he says, "but the competition is what really fuels me." Qualifying is hard, the field will be elite, and Benson wants nothing more than to cook against the best cooks in the world and see where he lands. He would rather swing and miss against that company than sit it out. If he wins, the plan is refreshingly ordinary: shift some things around, step back from the computer feeds, and be more available for the people he loves. He already knows his walkout song, "Are You Ready For This" by Clear Blue Fire, and he already knows the version of himself he wants on that stage, thankful for his family, thankful for the field, and, if Miriam has her way, jumping around a little.

From a ruined pot of macaroni to a $1,000,000 stage four and a half hours from home, the boy who thought cooking was torture is on his way to Las Vegas. He plans to enjoy every minute of it, and he plans to help a few people beat him while he is there.

Sources

Nate Benson, Road to 1 Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt, BBQ World Cup, 2026. BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker (Reserve Grand Champion, Slab-O-Rama Barbeque Challenge, Bullhead City). BBQ United and HubSpot team profile, Uncle Jesse's BBQ (team bio, American Fork, Utah). Uncle Jesse's BBQ on Instagram. Team B&B, B&B Charcoal (Famous Dave's All-Star win, Las Vegas).