BBQ Confessional

Late 2014 after finally eating at Franklin BBQ with a visiting family member from California we decided to learn more about Texas BBQ. Since then, at least once a year, we’ve traveled around Texas with friends for a long weekend of BBQ crawls trying new places and meeting the owners and pitmasters along the way.

Over the last 9 years as I’ve gotten to know quite a few of these folks personally and heard countless stories normally not heard or shared with the general public. The stories give a small glimpse into the lives of pitmasters, their trials, errors, mistakes, triumphs, life journey, and even embarrassing moments one wouldn’t care to share all the time. So in 2019 with the aim of telling these untold stories I started BBQ Confessional as a photo & storytelling project on Instagram. As the stories got longer and more detailed I decided it would be more of a personal experience for everyone to hear the stories from the folks who tell them and switched formats from photos and written stories to video in late 2023. The stories have ranged from the simple beginnings, to (almost) setting a laundromat on fire with greasy towels, to cooking a pit full of beef ribs while driving the pit through NYC, to food poisoning in west Texas and not being able to find a bathroom in time. These stories have also taken me from Connecticut to Los Angeles and even got me inside Studio 606 with the Foo Fighters to meet Dave Grohl and get a story of his BBQ journey after he broke his leg during a concert.

My goal is to share these stories and show the human side of the BBQ industry and hopefully one day be able to reach a bigger audience.

You can find all of the stories on my Instagram page with the video stories now on YouTube and TikTok.