International barbecue contests are booming
Participants in February’s barbecue cook-off at the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo may have noticed something different among the accents and languages heard and spoken by the competitors. Sure, there were the Texas twang and the Southern drawl, and plenty of Spanish mixed in with English. But if you listened closely, you also heard Japanese being spoken, and English accents.
For the first time, teams from outside the U.S. — two from England, one from Japan — competed in the World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest, joining more than 200 stateside entries.
International flavor in the American-style barbecue cookoff is a growing trend on the competition circuit. Indeed, not only are international cooking teams competing in the U.S., but large, sanctioned barbecue competitions are becoming big business across the pond. In Europe, hot spots are the United Kingdom and The Netherlands.
Barbecue competitions are traditionally “sanctioned” events, i.e., a presiding organization sets the rules and procedure to make sure the contest runs smoothly and fairly. In the U.S., the Kansas City Barbeque Society (KCBS) oversees the majority of sanctioned contests. In Texas, the International Barbeque Cookers Association (IBCA) sanctions many events.
In mainland Europe, the European BBQ Championship (ebcc-cup.eu), in partnership with KCBS, sanctions many events. In England, it’s the International Barbecue Network (ibqn.com), formerly the British Barbecue Society.
“There used to be KCBSsanctioned events in England, but now there are mostly homegrown sanctioned events here,” says Stuart Mathwig, a project manager from Cambridge, England. Along with the members of his barbecue team, “Dr. Evil BBQ,” Mathwig competes in competitions during weekends and his days off.
Mathwig recently joined a team in Ireland, which won The Big Grill festival in Dublin in August. With that win, the “Smokin Yankees BBQ” team earned an automatic invitation to October’s prestigious Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue held in Lynchburg, Tenn.
The Jack Daniel’s event is becoming a full-blown international competition. This year, 22 international teams from as far away as Australia, Switzerland and Ireland competed alongside 74 U.S. teams.
To be sure, a quick scan of the results shows that international teams generally placed at the bottom (Smokin Yankees BBQ was No. 84 of 96). But that’s to be expected. These teams mostly didn’t exist a few years ago and are still learning the winning techniques that make the American barbecue teams unbeatable for now.
At the Houston rodeo cook-off in February, one of the English teams came from Red’s True Barbecue, a chain of Texas-style barbecue restaurants in England founded by Scott Munro and James Douglas.
I had met one of their team members two years prior, during a tour I took of barbecue joints across England. At a Red’s location in Leeds, I struck up a conversation with pitmaster John Beard, who told me he planned to visit Houston and attend the cook-off.
We kept in touch, and when he visited in February 2014, I introduced him to Erik Mrok, owner of Lenox Bar-B-Q and a member of the Re-Group BBQ team that competes every year at the rodeo.
Beard was so inspired by his experience in Houston that he returned for the cook-off in 2015 and brought his bosses from Red’s. And in 2016, Red’s True Barbecue became one of the first international teams to compete at the World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest.
Of 430 total meat entries presented, Red’s placed 98th. Not a bad result for a new international participant in one of the world’s most prestigious barbecue competitions.