Diaspora Chefs Are Shaping the Future of American Barbecue

Can we all agree that America’s barbecue traditions can get a little silly? It’s great to honor the traditions that grew in the different parts of Texas and Tennessee and every corner of the Carolinas, but often it feels like barbecue appreciation devolves into petty prescriptivism about who is allowed to have sauce and who isn’t, and where mustard can exist. One of the oldest, most universal forms of cooking — slow roasting and smoking meat over an offset or open flame — becomes closed off to its own universality.

But over the past decade or so, America’s barbecue culture has gotten an injection from the immigrants and second-generation Americans who are incorporating American barbecue into their cuisines, and vice versa. It’s not quite chaos cooking, but more of a thoughtful fusion that emerges naturally from growing up in barbecue-rich locales. And it’s both a reminder that barbecue doesn’t have to be so rigid, and that, in fact, it never was.

This mix of international influence and American tradition isn’t limited to one barbecue region. At BuckTui BBQ in Overland Park, Kansas, Ted Liberda combines Thai cuisine and Kansas City barbecue with dishes like pork ribs with sweet chile glaze, and “Thai-KC burnt ends.” Sabar Barbecue in Fort Worth, Texas, brings Pakistani flavors to Texas traditions with seekh kebab sausages and sides like fruit chaat, while Blood Bros in Bellaire, Texas, makes a “pho rubbed beef belly” banh mi, and brisket chow fun. Austin, Texas’s new Si Baby-Q combines Mexican and Southeast Asian flavors in its barbecue, and serves it all with roti. In LA, Winnie Yee’s Smoke Queen combines multiple American styles with Asian flavors, serving pork belly char siu and beef ribs smoked with a gochujang sauce. And Atlanta’s Heirloom BBQ offers gochujang-rubbed spare ribs and collard greens with miso broth.

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Originally from Kerala, Ryan Fernandez was used to eating beef and cooking meat outside over fire. So when his family moved to Texas when he was a kid, Texas barbecue felt familiar. In college, he and his friends tried their own hand at it, and eventually got the idea to add South Indian masalas to the rubs and sauces. “We were like, wait, this is cool, we should just keep doing this and throw little parties here and there,” he says. Fernandez continued experimenting on his own, and in 2020, now living in Buffalo, New York, he started Southern Junction, a pop-up where he serves dishes like coconut curry smoked chicken, brisket biryani, and cardamom cornbread. In 2023, he opened a permanent spot.

Growing up, Fernandez says barbecue was more of a roadside food, and credits places like Franklin Barbecue and LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue for creating a larger craft barbecue movement around 2009. “I think that’s when all these other guys, me included, were looking at it going well, what if I put my own little spin on it?” he says.

Don Nguyen of Khoi Barbecue, which serves Vietnamese Texas barbecue, feels Franklin Barbecue’s influence had more to do with putting Texas barbecue on a wider map, attracting tourists from out of state and people who hadn’t previously had a connection with barbecue. But the immigration patterns in Texas have long influenced its barbecue culture, whether it’s through Mexican or Indian or Vietnamese populations. “Vietnamese food is front and center of the Houston culinary scene,” Nguyen says. Like Fernandez, he saw similarities between the cuisines growing in Texas. At this point, he side-eyes anyone who insists on “traditional” Texas barbecue: “My argument is like, what is traditional Texas barbecue these days? The demographics are changing so much.”

Because again, barbecue is a nearly universal cooking style. “Every culture has some kind of barbecue,” says Shuai Wang, chef and owner of King BBQ in Charleston, South Carolina, which explores the similarities between Chinese barbecue and various styles across the Carolinas. “Both are pretty pork heavy, and Carolina barbecue being mustard heavy pairs well with our barbecue pork ribs and chopped pork,” which Wang serves with a Chinese-style hot mustard. He also explains the differences between American, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese barbecue styles on King BBQ’s website, in case customers were under the impression he was the first to think it up.

These restaurants and food trucks demonstrate how no one culture has a monopoly on barbecue. And through their innovation (or their adherence to different traditions), American barbecue becomes an entry point into other cuisines. “People will say they always hated the smell of fish sauce,” says Nguyen. “I think recontextualizing it in such a powerful platform like barbecue really helps with that.” Now that they know they like fish sauce in a glaze on pork ribs, for example, maybe they’ll learn something else.

But fusing these flavors isn’t about trying to convince people to accept them. “People are realizing their culture’s connection to barbecue has always been there,” says Wang. The prevalence of these restaurants is part of a larger movement of immigrants and diasporas centering their own tastes, and not limiting their influence to a single country or culture of origin. “The diners need to just start understanding that we’re cooking our experiences, not our ethnicities,” Avish Naran of Pijja Palace, a self-described “Indian sports bar” in LA, told Eater in 2022.

If you grew up tasting the similarity between Texas roadside barbecue and Indian cooking at home, or understanding that whole-hog cooking has history in China and the Carolinas, why wouldn’t you want to combine them? They’re both yours, after all.