Meet the New Guard of American Barbecue

Take a sauce-fueled road trip through the Carolinas, experience the Super Bowl of Swine, plan your next big cookout, and more.

Pitmaster Ted Liberda marinates his brisket “Thai style” for 36 to 48 hours in a veritable vat of fish sauce.

Liberda grew up barbecuing with his father, a Vietnam war veteran from Kansas, and crafting egg rolls with his mother, an emigré from Thailand, at the family’s restaurant.

Buck Tui BBQ owner, Ted Liberda, holding a piece of brisket.

At Buck Tui BBQ in Overland Park, KS, pitmaster Ted Liberda serves a heaping tray of half-slab baby back ribs, smoked chicken, brisket, pork, Thai sausage, brisket burnt ends. On the side: garlic fried rice, slaw, potato salad, and pickles, among other dishes.

Just outside of Kansas City, at his Overland Park restaurant Buck Tui BBQ, Liberda merges these roots into a menu that’s as much Thailand as it is classic American barbecue. His marinated brisket gets rubbed down in the restaurant’s “heavenly seasoning,” a mixture of coriander, ginger, and granulated garlic. Then they’re oak-smoked for 16 hours before christening dishes like the restaurant’s pad Thai and brisket rangoons, crispy envelopes of fried wonton stuffed with a peppery whipped cream cheese, so airy they might float away.

Liberda is a disciple of barbecue’s “third wave,” a growing cohort of first- and second-generation immigrants who are putting their own spin on America’s legacy with flavors from their home cultures. This third wave is not “fusion” food, its proponents will be quick to tell you. The word conjures a chef who throws together foods without concern for culture or tradition, says Liberda, who describes his fare as Kansas City barbecue with Thai inspiration. “It ain’t the case that we're not authentic,” he adds. “We are authentic to what we do.”

Many of these third wave pitmasters are scrappy, self-taught, and hungry to redefine what makes American food “American.”

“When I first started, I got a lot of haters online saying, ‘Hey, you don't know what American barbecue is,’” says Winnie Yee, owner of Smoke Queen Barbecue, an “unapologetically Chinese” barbecue joint in Garden Grove, California.

American barbecue has always been a unique mixture of cultures, predominantly Black, Indigenous, and European influences. At a time when immigrant communities are under threat—when running a restaurant can itself feel like an act of resistance—it’s not politically neutral to take a food that is thought of as classically American and innovate on it using flavors from farther afield.

In its first wave, regional techniques emerged and the “Barbecue Belt” was born: Memphis, Texas, Kansas City, and the Carolinas. The second wave crested with the craft barbecue renaissance of the 2010s, when pitmasters began treating cuts of meat with the reverence white-tablecloth restaurants reserved for seasonal produce. Now pitmasters like Yee and Liberda are ushering in barbecue’s third wave as a cuisine that has always been a vehicle for blending cultures.

They’re not alone. In Houston, chef Don Nguyen, cofounder of Khói Barbecue, serves up his self-branded “Viet-Tex barbecue.” Kareem El-Ghayesh left a corporate finance career in Cairo to start KG BBQ in Austin, a half-Longhorn, half-Egyptian barbecue joint. At King BBQ in Charleston, South Carolina, pitmaster Shuai Wang is crafting Carolinian barbecue with Chinese and Pan-Asian flavors. Innovation is getting third wavers noticed, but the quality of their craft is speaking for itself. King BBQ made BA’s Best New Restaurants 2024 and Liberda’s wife Pam Liberda was a 2023 James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Midwest.

At Palmira Barbecue in Charleston, Hector Garate cooks whole pork heads for the restaurant's hash and rice, 15 at a time in a 1,000-gallon smoker he welded together himself. After smoking for 10 hours, the meat simmers in vinegar, garlic, sugar and a secret blend of spices, until it becomes a thick, almost gravy-like stew. “People go crazy when they eat it,” says Garate. “It's like a religious experience.”

Palmira Barbecue owner, Hector Garate, in Charleston, SC with his dog.

Garate's menu at Palmira combines the Carolinas’s whole-hog barbecue with Puerto Rican flavors for dishes like the restaurant’s coconut bread pudding and the pernil, a pork shoulder slow-roasted over coals and showered in seasonings like adobo, sazon, and sofrito.

Garate moved to North Carolina from Puerto Rico at 14. His menu at Palmira combines the Carolinas’s whole-hog barbecue with flavors from the archipelago into dishes like the restaurant’s coconut bread pudding and the pernil, a pork shoulder slow-roasted over coals and showered in seasonings like adobo, sazon, and sofrito. “It’s what everybody eats for Christmas in a Puerto Rican house,” says Garate.

Part of what makes barbecue’s third wave unique is that many of its rising stars are not beholden to tradition, says Garate, and thus more easily able to innovate. “Salt and pepper isn’t enough,” he says.

“Being Puerto Rican, you don't have your grandfather who was raised in the Carolinas to teach you what the family recipe is,” he continues. “And a lot of people in barbecue places, that's what they do. They've been doing barbecue forever, and they pass the recipes down, for better or for worse.”

Garate got into the barbecue game thanks to the pitmasters of the second wave, which inspired other artisans to collectively upped their craft. Barbecue became cool, sexy even. The Food Network cashed in on the craze, launching three shows throughout the 2010s and even a kid-themed spinoff.

Franklin’s Barbecue in Austin was the eye of the storm. Founded by now-legendary pitmaster Aaron Franklin, it was the millennial BBQ joint that launched a thousand ships, places like Lewis Barbecue in Charleston and InterStellar BBQ in Austin. In 2015, Franklin earned a Best Chef James Beard Award, the first given out specifically for work in barbecue.

The pioneers of barbecue’s third wave lack the same resources as their predecessors, says Garate. When he opened Palmira, he had to raise funds from friends and family. No bank would offer him a loan.

“I think that's what third wave is, essentially, right? It's the struggle too. It's not just the food. It's what that food represents,” says Garate. “It doesn't matter where you're from, if you really want it, and you really want to push forward and you have a passion for barbecue, you could do it too.”

Ruben Santana of Bark Barbecue began cooking his Dominican-meets-Texas barbecue during the pandemic out of his backyard in Queens, NY. When the neighbors complained about the smoke, he set up his offset smoker on the side of the street. “At that time, obviously, I had no customer base,” says Santana. “I was calling people like a telemarketer, saying, ‘Hey, I got some barbecue. Are you interested in buying it?’”

A Dominican-meets-Texas feast of longaniza, brisket, smoked carnitas, chicharrones, and tres golpes sandwich (pulled pork, fried cheese and maduros) and a smattering of sides from Bark Barbecue in Brooklyn.

Bark owner and pitmaster Ruben Santana at his barbecue counter in Brooklyn, NY.

In 2021 he quit his HVAC business to open his own storefront at Time Out Market in Brooklyn, where he serves Dominican comfort food twist on Texas barbecue. He spikes his cornbread with cinnamon and anise, “for extra flavor,” and his Dominican-style pork sausage is ground with garlic, oregano, and naranja agria, a sour, slightly bitter orange popular in the DR that flavors nearly every item on the menu. He’s also building a 8,000-square-foot brick-and-mortar in Bushwick, set to be finished in July.

It was intimidating entering the barbecue game, Santana says. Like many other third wave pitmasters, there wasn’t anyone in the space that looked like him; he had to draw the blueprints himself.

“There is a misconception that once you say ‘barbecue’ or ‘American barbecue,’ they only have one person, one image in their head,” says Santana. He’s learning that’s simply not true, much to his relief. But “it takes a lot of willpower, and [being] able to say, ‘Hey, I can go through this struggle, but there's a light on the other end of the tunnel.’”

Like Garate and Santana, Yee didn’t have the wisdom of pitmaster elders to rely on. She DIYed her first briskets, learning from Youtube, but grew bored recreating traditional Southern recipes.

“I wondered how it would taste if instead of salt and pepper or Lawry seasoning, I used five spice powder, some brown sugar, and Shaoxing wine?”

This was the birth of her char siu pork belly, which comes with a side of the restaurant’s signature barbecue sauce, an aromatic blend of fermented bean curd, caramelized soy sauce, and Chinese five-spice. “It's something that I really love and am very proud of,” says Yee. “It is exactly who I am. I'm not 100% Asian, not 100% American, but 100% Asian American.”

Yee was born in Malaysia, the child of second-generation Chinese immigrants, and moved to Orange County in 1987 when she was just six years old. She spent most of her youth in ESL classes, she says, feeling the pressure to assimilate quickly, to become an “all-American girl.”

At Smoke Queen Barbecue in Orange County, CA, Winnie Yee plates up brisket, pork belly siu yuk, pork belly char siu, and gochujang beef ribs on a tray with pickled vegetables.

Smoke Queen Barbecue owner, Winnie Yee, standing in front of her barbecue pit in Garden Grove, CA.

When she opened Smoke Queen’s pop-up business in 2020, Yee kept her identity hidden on social media; she didn’t want people to know right away she was an Asian woman. Or that she’s never even been to the south, she admits sheepishly. “In the beginning, I was very shy and timid. I was actually kind of afraid that people would discover that I was phony.”

Not long after opening, though, Yee’s char siu caught the attention of New York Times critic Tejal Rao, who featured the dish in her review of California’s emerging barbecue tradition.

“I realized then that I can't hide who I am,” Yee says.

“Up to that point I was cooking to impress people, I was cooking so that people would buy from me,” Yee says. “I have to be me.” Two young girls recently stopped her at the restaurant to tell her they enjoyed her food. They wanted to be chefs like her one day, they said.

“If there was somebody, a role model that looked like me in the public eye at that time, I would have grown up much differently. I would have grown up with a lot more confidence, and it wouldn't have taken me 35 years to finally feel like this is my home as well, that I belong in this country, and I belong at the table.”