The story of Rodney and Nick, brothers in barbecue

Rodney Scott has heard the story so many times before that he starts smiling as soon as his friend Nick Pihakis begins telling it.

Several years ago, Nick, a Birmingham barbecue baron who grew Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q from a single father-and-son shop into a regional brand with more than 40 locations in seven states, made a road trip to the small town of Hemingway, S.C., to visit Scott’s Bar-B-Q, the mom-and-pop business started by Rodney’s parents, Roosevelt and Ella Scott.

Rodney and Nick had met a few years before, and by this point, they were comfortable enough around each other to get into one another’s business.

Nick always marveled at all the hard work and long hours that Rodney put into making his whole hog barbecue so special that people such as himself would drive for hours to get a plate of it.

But he always thought Rodney was undervaluing his product, and on this particular trip, Nick finally told Rodney so.

“I walked in, and I was like, ‘Rodney, as hard as you work, that’s all you’re charging for your food?’” Nick recalls. “And he was like, ‘Well, what do you think I should charge for it?’ And I said, ‘$8 for this and $10 for that.’

“The menu was up on the wall, and the customers are lined up out the door, and he went and got a ladder and changed the prices in front of these people who were standing in line,” Nick goes on. “He just marked out the price and wrote the new price.

“And this lady that had already paid, she just looked up and said, ‘Sure am glad that I’ve already paid.’ Everybody else was just looking at it, going, ‘Well, I guess that’s the new price.’”

Rodney laughs and nods his head as Nick wraps up his story.

“That was a win for me,” Nick says. “Telling him how to cook a hog, or where to put the barrels or how to shovel the coals, that wasn’t going to happen, but he was like, ‘OK, you know how to make money and I know how to cook hogs, what do you think?’”

That wasn’t the beginning of their relationship – Rodney and Nick became fast friends from the first time their mutual friend John T. Edge of the Southern Foodways Alliance introduced them about a dozen years ago – but it was a turning point in both of their lives.

Many years later, Rodney would eventually leave his family’s barbecue business in Hemingway and team with Nick in 2017 to open his own Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ about 90 miles away in Charleston.

Nick, meanwhile, would sell Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q, which he started with his father in 1985, to an Atlanta-based private equity firm and partner with Rodney to grow the Rodney Scott’s brand across the South, opening a second location in Nick’s hometown of Birmingham in 2019.

A friendship is forged

That these two titans of Southern barbecue would eventually forge an indelible friendship was almost inevitable.

The youngest of four siblings, Nick was born in Pittsburgh in 1957, and his family moved to Birmingham when he was about 3 years old.

After graduating from Shades Valley High School, he got started in the restaurant business at 19, when he went to work as a bartender for legendary Birmingham restaurateur Connie Kanakis at Rossi’s Italian Restaurant on 20th Street South. In his spare time, Nick hung out with the cooks in the kitchen.

Several years later, Nick and his father, Jim Pihakis, a life insurance salesman, bought an old Pasquale’s Pizza franchise near the Highland Park Golf Course on Birmingham’s Southside.

It was dumb luck – or fate – that they opened a barbecue restaurant instead.

“We actually bought that Pasquale’s, and then we got a letter from the corporate office saying you couldn’t transfer the franchise,” Nick recalls. “So, we bought a franchise, but it was not legal to use the name, and we were like, you can’t run a business without a name.

“We were Greek, and most Greeks in Birmingham had hot dog restaurants or meat-and-threes or barbecue restaurants. So, we said it would be really cool to do barbecue.”

A longtime pitmaster who had worked at Ollie’s Barbecue and Johnny Ray’s restaurant came in and gave Nick a crash course in cooking barbecue, and Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q was born.

“We were sort of forced into changing what we were doing, and it was for the best,” Nick says. “It was a blessing in disguise. The rest of it is history.”

Over the ensuing years, Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q expanded its footprint beyond Birmingham and outside of Alabama, opening locations in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Colorado.

Although Nick has stepped away from the day-to-day business of running Jim ’Nick’s, he remains an investor and still serves on the board, he says.

Meanwhile, Rodney, an only child, was born in Philadelphia in 1971, but when he was a year old, his parents moved to Hemingway, a town of less than 500 people in the northeast corner of South Carolina.

His mother’s family had some farmland there, and they grew their own vegetables and raised their own hogs.

Not long after the Scotts moved to Hemingway, Rodney’s parents opened a little country store, where, every week, Rodney’s father smoked a whole hog and sold barbecue sandwiches.

“A lot of gas stations used to do side things, like cold cuts and hot dogs,” Rodney says. “We did barbecue sandwiches on Thursday, and that demand just grew to a two-to-three-day thing. The demand just overwhelmed the grocery store, so we just went to selling barbecue mostly.”

One day, when Rodney was 11, his father told him he was old enough to cook a hog by himself.

“Growing up where I did, it was always work,” Rodney recalls. “You had a chore, you had to do something, and they would be teaching you all these little, basic skills along the way. If you were big enough to work, you worked. And my job that day was to help with the hog.”

His father did the heavy work – splaying the hog and lifting it onto the pit – but he left Rodney to take care of the rest.

Just like he had watched his father do, Rodney burned the chopped wood down in the burn barrel, then shoveled the glowing coals underneath the racked hog, which he sopped with a mop dripping with a peppery, vinegar-based sauce. He kept vigil for 12 hours.

“I just kept doing what he told me to do all day long, and he came back and flipped it over and it was done,” Rodney recalls. “That was a long day.”

Rodney’s first pig came out just right

Cut, chop, cook

By the time he was 17, Rodney was working at Scott’s Bar-B-Q full-time.

As later documented in the Southern Foodways Alliance short film “Cut/Chop/Cook” by Joe York, he would get his chainsaw and go into the woods to cut trees on Monday, split the wood on Tuesday, start cooking the hogs on Wednesday, and serve barbecue Thursday through Saturday.

“They not only cooked with real wood,” Nick says, “but they went out and got it.”

Although Scott’s Bar-B-Q was a regional favorite in their little corner of South Carolina, Edge helped put it on the national map with a story he wrote for The New York Times in 2009.

It was around that same time that, based on Edge’s recommendation, Nick called Rodney and invited him to be the guest pitmaster at a benefit for the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Charleston location of Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q.

Rodney was skeptical at first.

“I was nervous about going, because I had never cooked on the road,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Man, what does this guy want from me? What is this event?’

“And I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to roll the dice and do it anyway.’ And we did, and we got through it.”

Rodney didn’t just get through it, though. He crushed it.

“When he came off of that pit with that hog and he and his uncle had that hog on a hog pan and carried it through the dining room, it was a standing ovation,” Nick recalls. “I mean everybody in that place went nuts.”

Rodney and Nick’s relationship took off from there.

Nick started making more frequent trips to Hemingway – not only to learn about Rodney’s old-fashioned barbecue methods but also to offer Rodney his two-cents’ worth on how to work smarter and faster and make more money.

“Immediately, I started telling him what to do,” Nick says. “You know, ‘If you did this and this, it would probably be easier. Why don’t you move that barrel closer? Why are you having to walk all that way to get coals? Why don’t you flip that hog over a little bit earlier?’

“Finally, he said, ‘If you want to stay here and watch what I’m doing, you can, but I know what I’m doing.’”

Rodney may have resisted Nick’s unsolicited advice, but he kept listening and soaking it all in. And as soon as Nick drove away, Rodney says, he put some of his suggestions to the test.

“Where we were in Hemingway, it was a stretch of road, and when his taillights disappeared, I would go back and try whatever he told me to try,” Rodney says. “I was like, ‘All right, this dude is pretty smart. This works.’”

Nick also taught him how to better estimate how much barbecue he sold each day so that he didn’t waste any food, Rodney says. And he even talked him into opening an extra day to meet the demand.

“I was just working hard, not smart,” Rodney says. “I didn’t know about projections. I didn’t count what I cooked all the time. I just did it.

“Nick opened my eyes to the efficiencies around the business, different ways you can do things to help you save on waste,” he adds. “So, I was impressed. I was like, ‘I’m gonna stick by this dude.‘”

As fellow members of the FatBack Collective -- a coalition of like-minded Southern chefs, writers, pitmasters and restaurateurs -- Rodney and Nick later traveled and cooked together at such events as the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York City, the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest in Memphis, and the Twilight Supper fundraiser for Jones Valley Teaching Farm in downtown Birmingham, as well as on international trips to Uruguay and Belize.

After a fire destroyed the cookhouse at Scott’s Bar-B-Q in Hemingway in 2013, Pihakis and other members of the FatBack Collective pitched in to host a series of benefits they called the Rodney Scott’s Bar-B-Q in Exile Tour, with Rodney hitting the road and smoking hogs to raise money to reopen.

Then, in 2015, when Rodney got remarried following a divorce, it was Nick who stood by his side.

“I had been dating my (soon-to-be) wife for a while, and he said, ‘When are you going to marry that girl?’” Rodney says. “And I said, ‘Let’s just go ahead and do it.’ I went shopping for a ring, we bought the ring, got engaged and got married four months later.

“I said (to Nick), ‘I want you at my wedding; I want you to be my best man,’” Rodney adds. “It was one heck of a weekend. Man, I can’t tell you everything, but we had fun. Everybody that was at that wedding still talks about it.”

Leaving Hemingway

Four years ago, in July 2016, Rodney left Scott’s Bar-B-Q to go into partnership with Nick and his Pihakis Restaurant Group.

“Oh, it wasn’t as hard as you think,” Rodney says, when asked about leaving his hometown and the family business where he had worked fulltime for nearly 30 years. “It was a pretty easy decision after a few situations, circumstances.

“But, you know, I’ve always been a dreamer,” he adds. “And in Hemingway, they thought I was absolutely crazy about (those) dreams.

“Talking to Nick – communicating, traveling and experiencing different events – I learned that your decisions are up to you. You can do whatever you want.”

Seven months later, in February 2017, Rodney and Nick opened their first Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ in a former fried chicken restaurant on King Street in Charleston.

Working with Pihakis Restaurant Group executive chef and COO Paul Yeck, they put together a menu that includes fried catfish, a steak sandwich, chicken tenders, collard greens, mac and cheese and other sides in addition to Rodney’s famous smoked pork, chicken and ribs.

“We both agreed that whole hog -- I mean, it’s on the sign; it’s what Rodney’s done his whole life -- but we needed some other things to put on the menu that would appeal to a broader customer base,” Nick says.

And, in 2018, all those years of cutting, chopping and cooking finally paid off when Rodney won a James Beard Foundation Award as the best chef in the Southeast – the first Black chef to win the Southeast chef award and only the second barbecue pitmaster to win any chef award from the foundation.

In his acceptance speech, he thanked his good friend, Nick Pihakis, and other members of the Pihakis Restaurant Group team for helping him realize his dream.

Asked about that night, Rodney quickly corrects a journalist who says “he” won the James Beard Award.

“No, no, no, no,” he says. “We.”

“Here’s the deal,” he adds. “Each player on this team -- in this family -- had a position and a contribution. And we all got together, and we communicated and put things down -- Paul with the recipes; Nick with recipes, procedures and opinions; and (Nick’s son) Nicholas, as well.

“We just constantly communicated, and it got us recognized and we won the award. If you play that (James Beard) speech back, you will hear me tell you (that).”

The week following the James Beard Awards, Nick and Rodney announced plans to open a second Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ in Birmingham.

“I kept telling Rodney, ‘We’ve got to bring this to Birmingham; this is my hometown,” Nick says. “And I’m proud of being a part of Rodney Scott’s.’”

So, in February 2019, they opened the Birmingham location of Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ in the former Bottletree Café space on Third Avenue South in Avondale.

Rodney calls Charleston home now, but Birmingham has become his second home.

“From the first few times we cooked here, the reception in Birmingham has been welcoming,” he says. “It’s been warm. It feels good. I don’t go anywhere I don’t feel good, and Birmingham feels good.”

Rodney and Nick are just beginning to grow, though.

The Pihakis Restaurant Group (whose brands also include Little Donkey Mexican Restaurant, Hero Doughnuts and Hot Dog Pete’s) is scheduled to open three more Rodney Scott Whole Hog BBQ locations over the next year – one in Atlanta’s West End area and one each in the Birmingham suburbs of Trussville and Homewood.

‘Every day is a good day’

If you run into Rodney Scott at one of his restaurants or when he’s out and about, there’s a good chance he’ll be wearing a black T-shirt with white, all-capital letters that say, “Every Day Is a Good Day.”

It is a reassuring adage that has gotten him through a divorce, a fire and some financial difficulties.

“I went through some challenging times, and I would look in the mirror every morning and say, ‘Every day is a good day,’” he says. “And I would just keep saying that, and the more I said it, the better I felt.

“People would call me, and I would say, ‘Every day is a good day.’ And it gave me that positivity just to carry on, move forward, hold my head up, and do what I needed to do.”

So, he decided to spread the message – he sells the T-shirt at his restaurants – and that positive energy became contagious.

“If I meet people, if I do an event, I try to smile, try to communicate with them, try to make eye contact,” he says. “You never know how you can change somebody’s day just by saying that or wearing this.”

And for Rodney and Nick, whenever they’re together, it is indeed a good day.

“It’s like any other kind of relationship, as life goes on,” Nick says. “The good thing about a good friendship is, you know they are always there.

“We’ve opened up two restaurants together. We’ve experienced fires in our business. Rodney getting married. My kids getting married. Just a lot of life experiences that we’ve been able to share together.”

Kind of like brothers.

“Yeah,” Rodney says. “We’re just like brothers.”

Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ has locations in Charleston, S.C., and Birmingham, Ala., with additional locations scheduled to open in Atlanta, Trussville, Ala., and Homewood, Ala. For menus, hours and more information, go here.

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