Charleston pitmaster Rodney Scott, featured on Chef’s Table: BBQ, started barbecuing at the age of 11 and hasn’t stopped since. He's best known for his commitment to keep the whole hog barbecue tradition alive. Apart from being a multiple award-winning chef, Rodney is now a Netflix star as well.
Chef’s Table on Netflix has been known to celebrate the many forms and flavors of food by featuring chefs from all over the world. The new spin-off of the popular docu-series, Chef’s Table: BBQ, brought along with it the world’s hottest barbecue chefs. Famously known as pitmasters, the Netflix show shared the tantalizing tales of well-known names like Tootsie Tomanetz, Rosalia Chay Chuc, Lennox Hastie, and Rodney Scott. Being featured in a New York Times article lit a fire for fame in 48-year-old Rodney’s heart that hasn’t fizzled out since. Life’s ups and downs have been plenty, but Rodney’s "Every Day Is a Good Day" mantra did earn him the award of Chef of the Year! But this Chef’s Table: BBQ star’s journey has only just begun.
The star chef from Chef’s Table: BBQ moved with his family to Hemingway, SC, when he was just one year old. An only child, there were many days where he was home alone as his parents operated a gas station and dry goods store they opened in 1972 that sold local produce and cold drinks throughout the week. But Rodney’s family did things a little differently on Thursday, when Scott’s Variety Store and Bar-B-Q roasted whole hogs. His dad Roosevelt was a tough parent, and by age 11 Rodney knew how to cook a whole hog by himself. His teenage years were spent toiling, and the Netflix star remembers working even on the day of his graduation. “This is my life, this is it,” decided Rodney as he kept cooking even though his father suffered from a stroke. Rodney dedicated himself to learning everything about the business, painted the storefront a “Carolina Blue” like his mother’s Cadillac, and soon went from preparing one hog a week to 30.
Rodney’s whole hog got its first taste of fame in 2009 after being featured in NYT, where he was quoted saying, “You’ve got to always be on point when you’re cooking this way.” The Chef’s Table: BBQ celeb’s restaurants pulled in crowds and callers from America and beyond. By 2012, Scott’s was firing up the pits for four days, serving the whole hog barbecue from Wednesday through Saturday. However, tragedy struck in 2014, when the smokehouse itself went up in flames. A grease-fire burned down Rodney’s famous restaurant, and all that remained were the 14 concrete fire pits and an outer, concrete wall garnished with dangling debris and charred tin. “Fire does what it wants,” said Rodney to SCNow. “This is like a speed bump. You readjust and you go over it again. We gotta rebuild the building and we’re good.” He surely picked himself right up and dusted the tragedy off with a part road trip, part old-fashioned barn-raising tour called Rodney Scott's Bar-B-Que in Exile Tour. As featured on Chef’s Table: BBQ, Scott raised $80,000 by making barbecue fans taste his legendary smoky and vinegary pork, thus indirectly preserving a regional food tradition.
Twenty-five years after running the family’s wooden cookhouse in Hemingway, Rodney partnered with the Pihakis Group, including chef Paul Yeck and seasoned restaurateur, Nick Pihakis, to open Rodney Scott’s BBQ in the North Central neighborhood of Charleston, SC in 2017. In the first year itself, the restaurant earned a spot in 50 Best New Restaurants by Bon Appetit Magazine. In 2018, Rodney was awarded the James Beard Foundation’s award for Outstanding Chef Southeast – the second pitmaster to do so. 2019 saw the talented Chef’s Table: BBQ personality open his next 64-seater restaurant in Birmingham, AL, serving items like Rod’s Original Whole Hog Pork Plate aka “The heart and soul of his BBQ,” spare ribs, steak sandwiches, Ella’s banana pudding, and more on the menu. After traveling the world from Uruguay to Australia, and being featured on TV with the likes of Andrew Zimmerman, Anthony Bourdain, and Al Roker, Rodney Scott is indeed preaching the word that, with positivity and diligence, “Every Day IS a Good Day.”
All episodes of Chef's Table: BBQ are available to stream on Netflix.
Source: NYT, SCNow, Scott's BBQ