Since elementary school, Rodney Scott has worked in the family business, feeding logs of hardwood into burn barrels to make coals over which whole hogs roast for 12 hours or more.
For years, people have been driving from all over South Carolina to the rural town of Hemingway for a plate from Scott’s Bar-B-Que, set in a cinderblock building painted white and trimmed in robin’s egg blue.
In 2009, John T. Edge, the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, wrote a column about Scott’s Bar-B-Que for The New York Times. In it, he praised the “ever-elusive authenticity” of their slow-smoked whole hog barbecue.
The article ran on Wednesday, June 10, when Scott’s was closed. They only cooked on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday back then. When the restaurant opened for its usual hours that week, sales jumped at least 20% and maybe more – Scott doesn’t remember for sure because the restaurant didn’t use a point-of-sale system at the time.
“That changed our entire lives. The piece ran in the morning and the phone line was busy all day long. It just rang and rang,” Scott said.
Shortly after the Times piece, the SFA produced a short film Cut/ Chop/Cook by Joe York—a nod to the cutting and chopping of wood followed by all-night cooking of the hogs. The film was shown during the 2010 Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York City, at which Scott cooked the food he knew best.
“Someone shook my hand and said ‘Thank you for the work you do,’” Scott said, recalling the New York City event. “And I was like ‘Wow, they respect it.’”
Other media outlets began to take notice, and Scott started receiving invitations to cook at events all over the South. By then, sales at Scott’s were up by more than 50% since Edge wrote the article in The New York Times, Scott said.
When the restaurant’s pithouse burned in 2013, a group of SFA friends including Nick Pihakis of Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q and Sam Jones of Skylight Inn BBQ (they call themselves the “Fatback Collective”) rallied and helped him devise a plan to rebuild. Scott visited several cities across the South and cooked whole hogs to raise money, and his journey was chronicled by NPR, Charleston’s The Post and Courier, The Local Palate, and others.
Articles mentioning Rodney Scott rose tenfold from just five in 2011 to 69 in 2017, according to Factiva, the Dow Jones data service that scours thousands of print and digital media publications.
In 2017, Scott opened his own place in Charleston, South Carolina: Rodney Scott’s BBQ. The advice and wisdom freely given from close friends in SFA was clutch, he says.
Pihakis invested in the enterprise, and also convinced Scott to start using a point-of-sale system by Square to track data on topselling items and supplies, and also integrate with bookkeeping and accounting systems.
“Instead of guessing how many hogs we need on a Wednesday, I can check the system and it tells me,” Scott said. “It shows me how many pounds of meat come off the hog, how much red pepper we’re going through, how many pots of sauce we use per week. It takes the mental pressure off me. Waste is down. And profits are a lot higher.”
Fellow pitmaster Jones, who recently branched out from his family’s Ayden, North Carolinabased restaurant Skylight Inn to open Sam Jones BBQ, had this to say: Brace for the one-star reviews on Yelp.
Sooner or later it will happen, Jones warned. Maybe someone was cranky that day or just being mean spirited. Ignore those people. And if something was legitimately wrong, make it right. No matter what, don’t let it drag you down, Jones said.
It was profound advice to Scott, who was still finding his footing as a sole proprietor after a lifetime under the umbrella of a family-run enterprise that offered both protection and constraints. It also spoke to an undercurrent of doubt about striking out on his own and getting comfortable with the pressure and scrutiny that comes with the spotlight: Am I good enough?
In May of 2018, Scott became the first African-American to win a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef Southeast, and only the second barbecue pitmaster ever to win a chef award.
“For me to be compared to people who are at 5-star resorts, places like Blackberry Farm, I just can’t believe it,” Scott said. “I always thought we were divided. But some of those chefs were looking at me like, ‘Wow, you stayed up all night and cooked this beast and put it on a plate.’”
That win helped Scott realize that there is just as much merit in his kind of cooking as that of any fine dining chef.
“We are all the same. We are one. I’m starting to accept that a little bit more,” Scott says, referencing a smooth R&B track by Frankie Beverly & Maze called “We Are One.”
He often cranks that track when he’s tending the pits. Days after the James Beard win, Scott announced plans to open a second location in Birmingham, Alabama, in partnership with Pihakis, a longtime SFA supporter who sold Jim ‘N Nick’s to Atlanta private equity firm Roark Capital Group in 2017.
Media mentions of Rodney Scott jumped nearly threefold in the first eight months of 2018 compared to the same period a year earlier, Factiva data show.
Scott credits SFA for giving him time and space to nurture his relationships with Pihakis, Jones, and dozens of other restaurant leaders and writers across the nation. Without them, he says he probably wouldn’t have had the courage and the means to go out on his own.