The Smoke Has Cleared — And It Doesn't Look Good for Rodney Scott's BBQ

Industry News · BBQ

All locations of Rodney Scott's Whole Hog BBQ have abruptly shut down. Here's what happened, who Rodney Scott is, and why the family's original pit is still very much alive.

TyroneBCookin.com  ·  May 5, 2026

If you follow the barbecue world at all, you probably saw the news drop on May 5, 2026: every single location of Rodney Scott's Whole Hog BBQ has closed. All of them. At once. Some mid-service, some with zero warning to staff. Signs on the doors say "temporary" and "until further notice" — but when a restaurant chain shuts down like this, those words don't carry much weight.

18 Years Later: Revisiting the 25 Reasons I'd Never Own a Restaurant

18 Years Later: Revisiting the 25 Reasons I'd Never Own a Restaurant

Back in 2008, I reposted a list on this blog. Twenty-five reasons a chef named Niall Harbison would never open a restaurant. I asked his permission, credited him properly, and then added my own little confession at the top — that 99% of his reasons were the same reasons I wrestled with the idea myself.

Here's what I didn't mention in that post: I wrote it from a ship.

What We Lost When the Tables Started Turning

The kind of place that knew your name before you sat down.

There was a BBQ joint on Cook Avenue in North Huntsville — right next to the D-Home — that I used to think about more than it probably deserved. Nothing fancy. No sign you'd notice from the highway. Just smoke and a parking lot and the kind of door that always seemed like it had been open forever. You walked in and the person behind the counter already had an idea of what you wanted. Not because they were psychic — because they remembered you.

That place is gone now. And honestly, so is a lot of what made it matter.

Curated Culinary Curiosities: LEGOs, Loopholes, and Lies

Welcome back to C3 — Curated Culinary Curiosities — where I round up the food stories that are too strange, too important, or too flat-out ridiculous to ignore. This batch? Oh, we've got a genuine crime caper involving pasta and LEGOs, a federal food safety loophole that's been hiding in plain sight for decades, a fast food chain that wants you to eat the wrapper, and a fraud problem with olive oil that makes me want to just press my own at home.

Let's get into it.

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🧱 The Pasta Bandit: A Crime Story in Several Courses

Confirmed & wrapped up — April 18, 2026

Drawer Clutter and Dirty Lies: The Most Useless Kitchen Tools Ever Made Popular

Being in professional kitchens taught me a lot of things. One of them is this: the tool industry's greatest trick was convincing home cooks that cooking is harder than it is — and then selling them the equipment to manage that imaginary difficulty. Today we're calling it out. From the banana slicer to the Rollie Eggmaster (yes, that's a real thing), here's the definitive Hall of Shame for kitchen gadgets that had no business being this popular.

Exhibit A through Z. You probably own at least three of these. No judgment. (Almost.)

Let me start with a confession.

I have been a professional chef for over thirty years. Hot, no-nonsense kitchens where if a tool didn't earn its place on the line, it got thrown in a drawer and never came back out. I've cooked aboard a hospital ship in West Africa. I've fed over a thousand people at a stretch on outdoor flat tops. I know what actually works in a kitchen — and I know what's a pretty lie wrapped in injection-molded plastic.