North Carolina’s best-known pitmaster is heading to the national Barbecue Hall of Fame

Drew Jackson
·5 min read
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The newest class of the Barbecue Hall of Fame includes one of North Carolina’s most acclaimed pitmasters.

Ed Mitchell, a legend of whole hog barbecue and one of America’s best-known smoked meat artists, will be inducted into the Barbecue Hall of Fame this year. Mitchell’s class includes John Markus, Joe Traeger, Lee Ann Whippen and posthumous honors for Bobby Mueller, Karen Putman and Goldsboro’s Adam Scott, whose barbecue sauce company has been in business for more than a century.

“Induction in the Barbecue Hall of Fame is barbecue’s top honor,” said Jackie McClaskey, interim CEO of the American Royal Association, in a release. “Selected from a pool of more than 80 nominees, this year’s inductees were evaluated and voted on by the Barbecue Hall of Fame nominating committee and living Barbecue Hall of Fame inductees based on their contribution, achievement and service within the barbecue community.”

Mitchell’s barbecue has spanned and included the full culinary spectrum, from selling coveted sandwiches out of a small Wilson grocery store to cooking at the famed James Beard House in New York City.

‘This is a lifestyle’

In a phone interview, Mitchell’s son and business partner, Ryan Mitchell, said the Hall of Fame honors a family legacy in barbecue that stretches beyond he and his father.

“I can’t put into words what this means,” Ryan Mitchell said. “For us this is a lifestyle, we’re talking about 100 years for my family.”

The men in the Mitchell family first thought football might be their ticket to any kind of hall of fame. Ryan Mitchell said his father, uncle and himself all had starry-eyed dreams of playing on Sundays in the NFL, following promising high school and some college careers.

“Football didn’t work out for any of us,” he said. “But God maneuvers your path. We’re on a completely different path of life. The dream was for us to make it to the hall of fame in football, but there was another hall of fame that we didn’t even know about.”

Barbecue is Ed Mitchell’s second career. Growing up, his family cooked whole hog barbecue a couple times a year for holidays or celebrations and he learned the craft as a teenager. After high school, Mitchell went to Fayetteville State, did a tour in Vietnam and after he earned his degree, went to work for the Ford Motor Company.

When his father became sick and later died, Mitchell helped his mother with the family’s grocery store in Wilson. One day they smoked a small pig for themselves, Mitchell said in an interview with the Southern Foodways Alliance, but customers quickly bought every bite. That was the moment that set Mitchell on a path to becoming one of America’s most renowned pitmasters.

Pitmaster Ed Mitchell questions the cooking technique of Food Network star Bobby Flay during a food challenge. Mitchell thought that Flay put his sauce on the ribs too early.
Pitmaster Ed Mitchell questions the cooking technique of Food Network star Bobby Flay during a food challenge. Mitchell thought that Flay put his sauce on the ribs too early.

‘America’s unspoken cuisine’

There isn’t a way to quantify someone’s path into the Barbecue Hall of Fame, no number of perfect hogs or mastery of smoke. Instead Ryan Mitchell said the honor marks his family’s place in American culinary history.

“For us it means surviving as a family and doing something that’s honored,” Mitchell said. “I’m not really sure how you objectively determine what it takes to get into the Hall of Fame. But the recognition is important to the craft. There’s not a steak hall of fame. There’s not a hamburger hall of fame or a pizza hall of fame. This speaks to the American cultural power of barbecue specifically. It’s America’s unspoken cuisine.”

The Wilson grocery store grew into Mitchell’s Ribs, Chicken & B-B-Q and over the years Mitchell himself grew into one of the South’s most famous pitmasters, particularly known for whole hog barbecue and ribs. Mitchell cooked in Oxford, Mississippi, for the Southern Foodways Alliance, in New York City at the James Beard House and as a founding member of the Big Apple Block Party.

In 2008, Mitchell brought his style of whole hog barbecue to Raleigh, opening The Pit with restaurateur Greg Hatem. Eventually Mitchell moved on from that partnership, though the restaurant remains. Mitchell opened his own short-lived Ed Mitchell’s Que in Durham.

Ryan Mitchell pointed to pieces of whole hog barbecue’s origins, of pigs cooked over pits by enslaved Africans and to later restaurants with white owners and Black cooks in the kitchen. He said his father’s barbecue was connected to those traditions, but shifted the spotlight to the craft itself.

“My father’s biggest contribution was to be able to put the craft and skill set of whole hog and take it to the forefront,” Mitchell said. “To be one of the first to recognize the historical aspect of barbecue, of the evolution of what barbecue was on plantations and what life was and what times were like, to take the craft and give it to the world when it wasn’t initially thought to be something of any great use, that’s huge.”

Though he hasn’t had a restaurant of his own in nearly a decade, Mitchell has remained in the barbecue spotlight, featured in barbecue shows on Netflix and the Food Network and in numerous national publications.

Currently, Mitchell and his son Ryan are working on a restaurant called The Preserve with LM Restaurants, the owner of Carolina Ale House. Ryan Mitchell said that project is in a holding pattern for now, waiting until the restaurant labor market, upended by the COVID pandemic, improves.

Past Barbecue Hall of Fame inductees from North Carolina include Wayne “Honey” Monk, Warner Stamey, Lyttle Bridges Cabaniss.