Rodney Scott was born into barbecue. At just eleven years old, he cooked his first whole hog at Scott’s Variety Store and Bar-B-Q, his family’s business in Hemingway, South Carolina.
For the last 25 years, he worked alongside his family, cutting wood, burning it down to coals, and tending to pigs for gruelling stretches. It was a rural tradition, slow and all-consuming, yet it bred in him an unrivalled mastery of the pit.
In 2009, the family business was profiled by Southern food historian John T. Edge. Not long after, on the day before Thanksgiving in 2013, a grease fire engulfed his smokehouse. While the adjacent store was spared, it would require serious funding to rebuild.
A group of chef friends, including Kelly English and John Currence, joined together to host a series of fundraisers under the banner of the “Rodney in Exile Tour”. Scott persevered, and in July 2016, he partnered with restaurateur Nick Pihakis. In February 2017, he opened his namesake restaurant at 1011 King Street in Charleston.
The gamble paid off spectacularly. That same year, the restaurant was named one of the 50 Best New Restaurants by Bon Appétit. In 2018, Scott was awarded the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef: Southeast – only the second pitmaster ever to receive the honour, and the first African-American to win the Southeast accolade.
Today, Scott’s empire has grown to multiple locations across the South, including Birmingham, Alabama (2019), Atlanta, Georgia (2021), and Nashville, Tennessee (2024).
He released his cookbook, Rodney Scott’s World of BBQ, in spring 2021, appeared as the subject of a full episode of Netflix’s Chef’s Table, and served as a judge on Food Network’s BBQ Brawl for two seasons.
Yet through all his success, he remains devoted to the open-pit, live-coal cooking he learned as a boy. For Scott, barbecue has never been merely a job; it is a lifelong commitment to community, heritage, and the simple, profound joy of feeding others well.
