Keeping the Fire Alive

By most accounts, one Black-owned brick-and-mortar whole-hog barbecue restaurant sits atop best-of lists across North Carolina: Grady’s BBQ in tiny Dudley, near Goldsboro in Wayne County. Run by 81-year-old Geral Grady and her family, it’s one of the last of its kind.

Grady’s late husband, Steve, learned the craft of whole-hog barbecue from his father. And for nearly 40 years, they perfected it.

Geral still shows up at Grady’s BBQ four days a week, checking the beans, tasting the slaw, and connecting with customers, while her son Scottie handles the pit. His wife, Sharon, works alongside him.

“We take it one day at a time,” Geral says. “You put your hand in God’s hand and step out on faith.”

Across North Carolina, succession in Black-owned barbecue restaurants isn’t as simple as passing down keys to the next generation. Some families have stayed and adapted; others have shifted to new models altogether. 

Three families exemplify these diverse paths: one that survived by staying small, one that left brick-and-mortar to return with a new approach, and one that found ways to sustain the tradition. 

The fires still burn, but the real question isn’t succession—it’s whether these businesses can survive long enough to be inherited.

Black Smoke

Adrian Miller, culinary historian and author of Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue, has spent years documenting Black barbecue traditions across the country. 

“I’m just not seeing a lot of people continuing the business as a brick-and-mortar place,” he said. “The next generation just isn’t going into it.”

Miller said running a restaurant “is incredibly hard now. Tight margins, inflation, labor shortages, high wages. For Black-owned barbecue joints, the challenges are even more pronounced.”

Post-pandemic, costs have only intensified. Food prices have risen. Labor is harder to find and more expensive to keep. Customers expect delivery options, online ordering, and modern packaging—all of which require front-end investment.

And then there’s the question of how much to sell it for. Black-owned barbecue restaurants, Miller notes, typically serve a clientele with less disposable income. “There is just serious downward pressure on prices,” he said. “I just don’t know how many Black-owned restaurants can charge $30 for a slab of ribs.”

White-owned craft barbecue restaurants can charge significantly more and face less resistance. The economic playing field isn’t level.

Then there’s the cultural shift.

“The larger culture is saying that what they do is not legit barbecue unless it’s the chef-driven and Texas barbecue aesthetic,” Miller said. “You’ve got all these Black joints which have been doing pork for years—you got people now walking in the door wanting brisket.”

It’s about who gets to define what “real” barbecue is, and who profits from that definition.

Miller is careful not to call the issues facing Black entrepreneurs “unique.” “Everybody faces these challenges,” he said. “They’re more pronounced for Black entrepreneurs—for a lot of historical reasons.”

Those reasons include lack of access to capital, fewer opportunities for investment, and systemic racism baked into lending practices, zoning laws, and neighborhood development patterns.

When these restaurants close, Miller said, “a thriving restaurant scene becomes less diverse.”

But it’s more than that. A cultural memory will blur. North Carolina barbecue will still exist, but it may increasingly be defined by white-owned restaurants with the resources to withstand crises, pivot to trends, and invest in marketing.

“The state will still have smoke,” Miller said. “But not necessarily the story behind it.”

The Accidental Yes

Geral and Steve Grady opened their restaurant on July 4, 1986, almost by accident. 

Steve’s brother and sister-in-law had renovated an old building on Arrington Bridge Road in Dudley—a former pool hall, service station, and grocery store—into a barbecue restaurant. They opened the doors at 11 a.m. By the end of the day, they were done for good.

“They looked at me and said, ‘We don’t want this,’” Geral recalls. “I said, ‘Y’all got to be kidding. All this renovation you done did.’ They said, ‘No, we don’t want it.’”

That night, Steve asked Geral: Do you want a restaurant?

She’d just had back surgery and left her job as a nursing assistant at Wayne Memorial Hospital. Steve had been working at a sawmill for 30-some years and farming tobacco on the side. Neither of them had run a restaurant before.

Geral said yes.

“Be careful what you say yes to,” she says now, laughing. But she meant it as a blessing, not a warning.

Steve cooked hogs overnight after his sawmill shift ended. Geral finished cooking in the morning—chopping the meat, making slaw, and in a little black iron pot she still owns, cooking beans—and opening the doors. On day one, they had no idea what they were doing.

“Couldn’t keep up with the beans,” she said. “Thought I was doing something with that little black pot.”

They learned as they went. Steve had learned whole-hog from his father, not in a restaurant, not commercially, but for family and community. The knowledge he carried was the kind passed hand-to-hand, learned by watching, by feel, by standing beside someone older who said, “When it sounds like this, it’s ready.”

Geral learned from her mother in the kitchen. “My mama taught me,” she said. “Steve was the same way—never had to measure a thing.”

For nearly 40 years, they worked. Steve tended the pit, Geral tended everything else. They never advertised. “Prayer and word of mouth,” she said. When people suggested they expand—open a location in Goldsboro, get bigger—they refused. “We said, ‘No. We’re going to stay small.’ And that’s what we did.”

“The state will still have smoke. But not necessarily the story behind it.”

Adrian Miller, culinary historian

They put Dudley on the map for barbecue obsessives, casual customers, food writers, and, eventually, the wider world. Customers drove from Durham, Charlotte, and Fayetteville. GQ magazine came. International food media visited. Word spread, not because of marketing, but because of consistency, humility, and something people couldn’t find elsewhere: whole-hog cooked the old way.

The accolades followed. Steve and Geral were inducted into the North Carolina BBQ Hall of Fame in 2024. Later that year, Steve was also inducted into the American Royal Barbecue Hall of Fame at 90 years old.

“We’re just blessed, Geral said when they got the news. “We’re overwhelmed.”

When Steve died last August, people wondered what would happen. Would Grady’s close? Would the oldest Black-owned brick-and-mortar whole-hog restaurant in North Carolina go dark?

“If we don’t exist anymore,” she said, “they’ll be heartbroken.’

She means the customers who’ve been coming for decades. The ones who fly in from out of state. The ones who drive hours for a taste of something they can’t find anywhere else. But she could also mean North Carolina itself—a state that built its barbecue reputation on the labor and craft of Black cooks, on whole-hog traditions kept alive in small towns, and anchored by restaurants like hers.

The question lingers: When Geral can no longer do this, what happens next?

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just take it one day at a time.”

The Lineage

Born in the late 1800s, Ryan Mitchell’s great-grandfather had 35 children with his first and second wives in Wilson County. He was a sharecropper, the kind of person who cooked whole hogs for family reunions and church gatherings, who passed down knowledge in dirt, smoke, and the particular way peppers and apple cider vinegar cut through pork fat.

Ryan, who was born in 1977, remembers sitting at the dinner table with people from that generation, people who remembered Reconstruction, who knew how to dig a pit in the ground and tend a fire all night.

“I grew up sitting around human beings born in the 1800s,” Ryan said. “That’s not something everybody from my generation can say.”

That lineage carried with it a deep culinary inheritance, but also a specific kind of hardship. Sharecropping. Servitude. Labor that someone else owned. When Ryan’s grandfather ran a corner grocery store in Wilson, it was a step toward ownership, toward building something for the family.

When his grandfather died in 1991, the family was scrambling. “We were grieving,” Ryan said. “My grandmother’s love language was cooking and preparing food. We decided to pivot to this craft that had been a saving grace for so many generations—barbecue as a way to make a living, a way to get by.”

The corner store became Mitchell’s Ribs, Bar-B-Q & Chicken. At 12 years old, Ryan was in the smokehouse learning from elders who loved the craft but refused to commercialize it. 

“Old pitmasters who want nothing to do with it as a business,” he said. “They’ll do your family functions, but that’s it.” 

They’d come by and check on the family’s operation—make sure the hog had enough fat, make sure the position was right, teach little tricks of the trade. But they wouldn’t run a restaurant themselves.

Ryan absorbed the craft. He also absorbed something more complicated: the feeling of servitude that lingered in the work.

“A lot of the former plantation workers and owners that my grandmother used to keep house for, they were still the culture that used to come in the restaurant,” he said. “I knew we had a gift, and I knew we loved to feed people, but it still felt like those stories my grandmother would tell me when she had to cook and clean in these homes. It took me a while to transition to ‘we do this for a living’ versus ‘doing this as something you used to be made to do.’”

That tension between the pride in the craft and the shadow of its history never fully left him. He wanted to do other things with his life. Football. College. Anything but chopping hogs under fluorescent lights.

But barbecue found him anyway.

The Mitchell family eventually closed the restaurant in Wilson in 2005. In 2007, Ed Mitchell, Ryan’s father, partnered with investors to open The Pit in Raleigh, a venture he left in 2011.

Ed was one of the first Black pitmasters to achieve national celebrity, cooking at the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York, becoming a James Beard Award semifinalist, and appearing in major food media. He and Ryan brought whole-hog tradition to audiences who’d never tasted it. 

Ed opened Que in Durham in May 2014, but it closed less than a year later, limited by kitchen space that couldn’t meet demand. 

So the Mitchells pivoted. They developed a line of sauces and rubs—no sugar, no salt, real fruit. They published a cookbook. They became a product brand rather than a restaurant brand.

“It was a different way to preserve the knowledge,” Ryan said. But he also knows what a cookbook can’t capture: the daily practice, the feel of the fire, the way you learn by standing beside someone who’s done it ten thousand times.

“It took me a while to transition to ‘we do this for a living’ versus ‘doing this as something you used to be made to do.’”

Ryan Mitchell, whose family owned Mitchell’s Ribs, Bar-B-Q & Chicken

Ryan plans to open a restaurant in Raleigh this year. Not a reopening of the Wilson spot, but an entirely new venture featuring strategic rebuilding after years of pivoting.

“When that second phase of bulldozers come out, then I will know it’s real,” he said. Even with his father’s fame, even with a cookbook and sauces in stores, the path remains uncertain. Permits take months. Capital is scarce. Plans stall.

But he keeps going because the legacy is bigger than the setbacks.

The Mitchell story is often held up as a success, and it is. But even their success required leaving home, pivoting away from brick-and-mortar, and rebuilding with resources most families don’t have: celebrity, capital, time, media visibility.

If the most famous Black barbecue family in North Carolina had to pivot and spend years away from a physical restaurant, what does that say about everyone else?

Alternative Models

Mike Neal learned whole-hog barbecue from his grandfather’s crew. “The elders,” as he calls them. Grandfathers, friends, men who knew how to dig a pit in the ground or build one from cinder blocks, who cooked for family reunions and church gatherings.

They taught him by letting him watch, fetch wood, grab a knife, tend the fire. Eventually, he learned the craft itself—whole hog, peppers, apple cider vinegar, the Eastern North Carolina way.

But the elders wouldn’t commercialize it. “They didn’t want nothing to do with it as a business,” Neal said. “They’d do your family functions, but that’s it.”

Neal didn’t plan to commercialize it either. He went to college, became an engineer, and worked for Procter & Gamble. Barbecue was something he did on weekends, something that tugged at him when he couldn’t find it in Greensboro the way he remembered it growing up.

Then a veteran pitmaster who ran a small barbecue operation in Greensboro fell ill. The owner had shifted to turkey barbecue because it was easier to manage after a heart transplant. When he died, there was no succession plan, no family to take over, and no guarantee the pit would survive the month.

Neal stepped in. “It kind of fell in my lap,” he said. “I couldn’t let it disappear.”

Today, Neal runs Hickory Tree Turkey BBQ in Greensboro. It’s not the whole-hog his elders taught him, but an adaptation. Turkey is more manageable, less physically demanding. But the smoke is the same. The knowledge his grandfather’s crew passed down is still alive, just applied to a bird.

Neal also travels the fair circuit, a model with lower overhead, more flexibility, and built-in audiences. It’s a way to sustain the tradition without the crushing costs of brick-and-mortar alone.

And he’s thinking about legacy. His 13-year-old son, MJ, has been working the business since he was 8, first as a cashier, now helping at fairs. His daughter is in college studying computer science and engineering. She’s thinking about how to modernize the business and bring technology into food production.

“I made the decision to invest in that equipment with legacy in mind,” Neal said.

Neal isn’t alone in finding alternative models. Other Black-owned businesses, like Corner Boys BBQ in Raleigh, operate as food trucks, cooking whole hog over wood with a drum grill—an old-school technique in a new format. Backyard BBQ Pit in Durham has long served as a family-owned community institution; its future is in question as it explores the sale of its operations, reflecting the pressures that have left many legacy barbecue restaurants searching for a next chapter.

Miller, the historian, believes food trucks may be the future. “I’d rather have the barbecue in a truck than lose it entirely,” he said.

Innovation isn’t betrayal. It’s survival. The knowledge persists. The smoke persists. But the form is changing.

North Carolina’s barbecue tradition is not a story of rustic white pitmasters perfecting an art in rural smokehouses. It is a story of Black cooks laboring for centuries, first in pits they did not own, then in restaurants they built with their own hands.

For over 300 years, Black pitmasters made whole-hog cooking not just a technique but a tradition, a vocabulary, a worldview. They turned labor into celebration, scarcity into flavor, servitude into something they could own.

When these restaurants close, what’s lost isn’t just businesses. It’s the custodians of the story. It’s the places where people gathered, where knowledge was transferred hand to hand, where continuity mattered more than trends.

White-owned craft barbecue restaurants aren’t the enemy. But they occupy the real estate, price brackets, and media bandwidth that Black-owned restaurants struggle to access. They become the first places tourists visit. Their aesthetics—sleek counters, open kitchens, minimalist wood—become shorthand for quality. Visibility becomes narrative. Narrative becomes economic power. And the story of who actually built this tradition gets quieter.

Miller argues that part of the problem is that North Carolina hasn’t celebrated its barbecue identity loudly enough, allowing Texas-style to dominate national conversations. “People need to brag about their tradition,” he said. “Yours is much deeper.”

The fires are still burning in Greensboro, Dudley, and a handful of other places. But the air is thinner than it used to be. The embers still glow, tended carefully, not guaranteed to last.