William Shatner Told 50,000 Fans to Come to Raleigh for One Thing: Christopher Prieto’s Brisket

William Shatner is ninety-five years old and has played the same starship captain for six decades. On a July weekend he sat in a convention hall in Raleigh, North Carolina, signing autographs for fans in costume. Then he took a microphone and spent part of his spotlight talking about brisket. The barbecue he had eaten the night before stayed with him, and he wanted the room to know exactly where to find it.

The room was GalaxyCon Raleigh, the four-day pop-culture convention that ran July 23 to 26 and drew more than 50,000 people downtown. Shatner named the restaurant without hesitation, called the meal fantastic, and told the crowd to make the trip. “You should come to Raleigh,” he said. The place he was pointing them toward sits about fifteen minutes east, in the town of Knightdale, and the man who runs it is a Texas-raised pitmaster named Christopher Prieto.

The barbecue that stopped a Star Trek legend

Prime Barbecue cooks Texas-style, which in practice means beef, oak smoke, and patience measured in shifts rather than hours. Its brisket smokes for nineteen hours before it reaches a tray, long enough that someone has to tend the fire through the night. Prieto’s team had catered a private event at the convention and handed Shatner a plate, which is how a ninety-five-year-old actor ended up recommending a Knightdale smokehouse to a hall full of strangers.

Texas-style is a deliberate choice in North Carolina, a state that made its name on whole hog and pork shoulder. Prieto smokes beef the way Central Texas meat markets do, leaning on salt, pepper, post oak, and time rather than sauce, and letting the brisket’s bark and rendered fat carry the flavor. Doing that well is unforgiving. A brisket that comes off too early is tough, too late is dry, and the only way to hit the window is to read the meat and the fire for most of a day. The long cook is not a marketing number. It is the cost of the result.

The endorsement was not a paid spot or a staged bit. It was a man who liked his dinner enough to say so into a microphone. What makes the moment land is who Shatner was praising without knowing the full resume. Prieto is not a weekend hobbyist who got lucky with a famous customer. He is one of the most decorated pitmasters on the East Coast, and Prime has spent five years collecting the kind of recognition that usually takes a restaurant a generation to earn.

Who Christopher Prieto is

Prieto grew up in Texas, raised by parents who had immigrated from Puerto Rico, and came to barbecue through family gatherings before he ever made it a job. He studied at East Carolina University, then started competing on the barbecue circuit at around twenty-one. Over the next fourteen years he traveled the country cooking in contests, led winning teams in the Kansas City Barbeque Society, and in 2011 took Grand Champion at the Beer, Bourbon and Barbecue Festival in Cary. He spent nearly a decade on the other side of restaurants too, managing and training for Carrabba’s Italian Grill, learning the business before betting on his own.

In March 2020, during the first weeks of the pandemic, Prieto opened Prime Barbecue in Knightdale. The timing looked reckless and turned into the start of something. The restaurant has since landed in the Michelin Guide to the American South with a Bib Gourmand, earned a spot on Southern Living’s list of the best barbecue in the South, and ranked among Texas Monthly’s top Texas-style joints outside of Texas. In 2025 Prieto was named a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: Southeast, the industry’s closest thing to a national short list, after being honored as a Triangle Business Journal 40 Under 40 in 2021.

Barbecue fans knew his face before Shatner did. Prieto has cooked on national television more than once, appearing on the original BBQ Pitmasters, on BBQ Brawl opposite Bobby Flay and Michael Symon, on Chopped, and on Man Fire Food. He co-authored Southern Living’s Ultimate Book of BBQ, and he has used the platform to give back, cooking for veterans and community groups around the Triangle. In 2023 he added Primo Latin Cuisine, a food truck behind the restaurant that runs his Puerto Rican heritage through barbecue technique.

His next project is the biggest yet. Prime STQ, a steakhouse-and-barbecue hybrid, is under construction at the Horseshoe development in the Research Triangle, and Axios called it one of the area’s most anticipated openings of 2026. Prieto is scaling from one Knightdale smokehouse into a small restaurant group, which makes a national shoutout arrive at a useful moment.

Why a convention shoutout matters

A celebrity liking a restaurant is not news by itself. What makes this one worth telling is the scale and the accident of it. GalaxyCon is one of the largest conventions in the Southeast, and Shatner’s platform inside it reaches people who have nothing to do with barbecue media, competition circuits, or restaurant guides. He was not reading a sponsor’s card. He tasted something one night, remembered it the next day, and spent real attention telling tens of thousands of people to go find it. That is word of mouth no marketing budget can buy.

GalaxyCon itself is a machine for this kind of moment. The Raleigh edition packs four days of celebrity panels, wrestling, cosplay, and autograph lines into the downtown convention center, and its guest list runs from Star Trek to modern streaming stars. Feeding an event that size is its own logistics problem, and Prime’s catering put its beef in front of exactly the person capable of amplifying it. Shatner did the rest, unprompted, from the stage.

It also says something about where barbecue sits in the culture now. A Texas-style brisket, cooked in a small North Carolina town by the son of Puerto Rican immigrants, reached a Star Trek icon through a catering tray and traveled from his mouth to a convention hall to the internet inside a single day. North Carolina built its own barbecue identity on whole hog and vinegar, and here a beef-and-oak outsider became the thing a legend told the room to try. The craft that used to live in roadside pits now moves through pop culture on its own steam.

The line that forms next

For Prime, the timing folds neatly into a bigger year. With Prime STQ due to open and the James Beard recognition still fresh, a national voice pointing new diners toward Knightdale lands right as Prieto expands. Regulars already know to expect a wait on a Saturday. After a ninety-five-year-old actor told a convention hall the barbecue was fantastic, that line is only going to grow. Thank you, Captain.

Sources

The News & Observer, via Yahoo News: Where William Shatner and Flava Flav dined in the Triangle.

ABC11 Raleigh-Durham: GalaxyCon Raleigh 2026 guests, hours and tickets.

WRAL: Prime Barbecue pitmaster Christopher Prieto has barbecue down to a science.

James Beard Foundation: The 2025 James Beard Award semifinalists.

Michelin Guide: Prime Barbecue, Knightdale, North Carolina.

Southern Living: the South’s best barbecue joints and Prime Barbecue’s work with veterans.

Texas Monthly: the best Texas-style barbecue outside Texas.

Triangle Business Journal: 40 Under 40, Christopher Prieto (2021).

Axios Raleigh: the most anticipated Triangle restaurant openings of 2026.

Pinehurst Barbecue Festival: Christopher Prieto bio.

Images: William Shatner at GalaxyCon Raleigh, courtesy GalaxyCon. Food and pitmaster photos courtesy Prime Barbecue.