FEATURES | SOUTH CAROLINA
Pitmaster John Lewis Builds His Own Fire
He taught himself to cook. And when the BBQ pits weren’t good enough, he taught himself to weld. Then he carried Central Texas BBQ east, one custom-built smoker at a time.
By Eric Barton | Oct. 8, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
John Lewis learned to cook the way some kids learn to fix cars: because somebody in the house had to.
In El Paso, his father was on the road selling computer systems for IBM, his mother was fighting cancer and a run of other illnesses, and neither of his parents could cook. Lewis was the oldest of three kids, so dinner fell to him. He worked from PBS shows and from cookbooks, and by his own estimate about half of what he made failed. He kept going anyway.
“I wasn't thinking about becoming a chef,” he says. “I was a kid who liked to eat and quickly figured out that if I wanted something good, I could learn to make it myself.”
What that kid became is one of the biggest names in the barbecue world today, with barbecue spots spreading across the south—three already and a fourth on the way. He helped answer the question if Central Texas barbecue—brisket cooked over post oak and served until it runs out—can survive in places that define smoked meats very differently. The Charleston original of Lewis Barbecue holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Greenville followed, Atlanta opened in December, Raleigh is next, and Rancho Lewis serves the border food he grew up on. The reason it works is the least romantic idea in barbecue: Lewis doesn't trust the pitmaster. He trusts the pit, because he designed and welded it himself.
Lewis at his Atlanta restaurant
His roots are in the desert. Lewis was born in Brooklyn and raised in El Paso, where Mexican, New Mexican, and West Texas cooking meet, and where his great-grandparents farmed chiles in Garfield, New Mexico, two miles north of Hatch. “My obsession with chiles didn't come out of nowhere,” he says. “It's literally part of my family history.” Barbecue in El Paso meant beef back ribs over charcoal, not brisket. Special occasions meant Cattlemen's Steakhouse, a place he still hits on his annual trip back for chiles.
At 18 he moved to Austin. His parents gave him a New Braunfels smoker for his birthday, and the tinkering began: a store-bought offset, an electric smoker, a cooker built from steel trash cans, one built from a refrigerator. Then, after he taught himself to weld, he built a smoker from 55-gallon drums. A stint in Denver on the competition circuit followed. In 2010 he returned to Austin to help his friend Aaron Franklin open Franklin Barbecue, at a moment when the city's barbecue was changing fast and nobody had a textbook. “You cooked, watched what happened, changed something and did it again,” he says. “That experimental mentality has never really left me.”
In 2012, Lewis partnered with LeAnn Mueller to open La Barbecue. Within months it had made Texas Monthly's Top 50 list and been voted the best barbecue in Austin. And then Mark Miller walked in. Lewis had learned from Miller’s cookbooks as a teenager and admired how he treated chiles the way other folks treat wine. Miller came two days in a row. Lewis brought in the cookbooks he'd owned since he was a teenager and asked him to sign them. “Here was this guy whose books I had been cooking from as a kid,” he says. “And now he was coming to eat barbecue I was making.” But Austin was filling up with people cooking the same brisket in the same lane, and Lewis wondered where else this style could mean something.
Chopped brisket sandwich
The answer arrived by invitation. In 2015 he cooked at an event in South Carolina alongside Rodney Scott and saw Charleston for the first time. The local barbecue he tasted—cold-smoked, then braised—struck him as something he could do better, and the crowd's reaction to his beef ribs, brisket, and “Hot Guts” sausage told him the rest. “It was basically market research,” he says, “without me really meaning to do market research.” He liked Charleston too, its restaurants, its creative energy, the fact that it still felt like a town. And South Carolina had oak, because, after all, barbecue starts with fire.
Central Texas-style BBQ
Lewis Barbecue Charleston
In June 2016 he opened Lewis Barbecue in Charleston's Upper Peninsula, and the engineering became the identity. Lewis has never bought a premade pit. His cookers are welded from 1,000-gallon propane tanks and designed around airflow, so that the machine, not the pitmaster’s mood, governs the result. With some 60 cooks across his restaurants, he says, “We're trying to make it closer and closer to being idiot-proof.” Other barbecue joints started buying his pits. The Atlanta restaurant, opened in December, cooks in a rooftop smokehouse full of them.
His El Paso roots got space in time: a trailer called Juan Luis in 2017, then, in the spring of 2022, Rancho Lewis in downtown Charleston. There’s hatch chiles, pinto beans, mesquite fire, the food of the border he grew up on. He still makes the pilgrimage to New Mexico every year, roasting thousands of pounds of chiles. Greenville's Lewis Barbecue followed in September 2022. Raleigh is next, and Lewis has suggested four locations may be enough. His days now are spent “putting out fires…and keeping the fires going. Literally and figuratively.” His standard: “The brisket shouldn't be better because I happen to be standing next to the smoker that day.”
A spread from Lewis Barbecue Atlanta
Ask him about the next chapter and talk of the smokers recedes. He talks instead about the time he went to a gem faceting school in Oregon. Now, he mines sapphires in Montana, cuts the stones himself, and dredges creeks for gold. He made his wife's ring from a teal-blue Montana sapphire, and their wedding bands from gold nuggets he prospected. If mining sapphires and gem faceting sound unrelated to barbecue, he can explain.
“I like making things,” he says. “I like learning a process, getting obsessive about the details, and ending up with something tangible at the end.”
A brisket, a welded pit, a cut stone. The process is the point; it always was.
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