Photograph by Growl Bros.
The smokehouse at Lewis Barbecue, which recently opened at Ansley Mall behind The Cook’s Warehouse, is unlike any smokehouse I’ve ever seen. Most barbecue places cram their cookers in the kitchen or in outbuildings with screened windows, like chicken coops. This one put theirs upstairs in a spacious loft with panoramic windows overlooking the new pedestrian bridge to the Beltline. Six 22-foot smokers fill the space, making it look like the fanciest engine room in Georgia. They run 24 hours a day, staggered in eight-hour shifts, a factory rhythm that turns out some of the best brisket you’ll find in Atlanta.
John Lewis, the pitmaster and proprietor, helped weld the smokers out of 1,000-gallon propane tanks. “It took me a lot of work to perfect these,” he said, opening the lid to one of the cookers and demonstrating how smoke doesn’t billow into the room. He designed the equipment so smoke rotates around the meat like a convection oven and exits the stacks in little cyclones.
“I like smoke flavor,” he said, “but I don’t want to be burping it an hour later. I like it delicate.”
Photograph by Growl Bros.
At 48, Lewis is tall and slender with a close-cropped beard and dark glasses that make him look like a professor of the barbecue arts. For the past decade, he’s run one of the best pits in Charleston, the original Lewis Barbecue, which received a 2025 Michelin Bib Gourmand award for quality and value. But his roots are in Texas. He’s so devoted to his home state that he imports post oak wood from there because he believes it burns better than the heavier, moister oak from the Southeast.
Born in El Paso, Lewis moved to Austin as a teenager and became friends with Aaron Franklin, the future savant of central Texas barbecue. They played around with backyard smokers and eventually opened a food trailer together in 2010.
“We took something good [Texas brisket] and made it better,” Lewis said. “And now the world loves it.”
He lived for a time in Denver, where he started a competition barbecue team and adopted a pot-bellied pig as a pet, training him to walk on a leash and taking him onstage when he won prizes. “He got into some bacon one time and loved it,” he said. “This is kind of sick and twisted, but I used to give him a strip of bacon every Christmas Eve.”
Lewis soon returned to Austin and worked with Franklin at his celebrated restaurant, Franklin Barbecue, for a few years. Then he became the pitmaster at La Barbecue in Austin, working with members of the Mueller family—as in Louie Mueller, one of the most revered barbecue joints in Texas.
But he felt like he would always be in the shadow of bigger barbecue stars in Austin, so he decided to go elsewhere. He was considering moving to the California wine country when he was invited to cook at an event in Charleston where he shared the stage with Rodney Scott, master of South Carolina whole-hog barbecue. He fell in love with the city and met some business partners who wanted him to open a restaurant there.
All the time, he and his new partners had their eyes on Atlanta. “We really sussed it out,” Lewis said. “I ate a lot of barbecue here. I really like what they do at Heirloom Market.”
I asked what he thought about other places known for their brisket, such as DAS BBQ and Fox Bros.
“I tried them numerous times,” he said. “You know, the Fox brothers are from Dallas, which is what I would call southern Oklahoma.”
Did he like their food?
He deflected the question. “I opened a restaurant here, so there you go.”
Photograph by Growl Bros.
Lewis Barbecue is one of the largest smoked-meat emporiums in metro Atlanta. Beneath that rooftop smokehouse, there’s a dining room with cafeteria line service and four meat-ordering stations to minimize the wait. On the other side of a breezeway, a separate lounge and event space called Bar Lewis sports Texas decor that looks like something J.R. Ewing might have commissioned for Southfork.
The menu features brisket, beef ribs, pork ribs, beef and pork sausage, turkey, and eight side dishes, including cowboy pinto beans, tallow-fried potatoes, and the restaurant’s signature green chile corn pudding. Lewis loves green chiles—his great-great-grandparents ran a chile farm in Hatch, New Mexico—and he offers green chile sauce on the side.
“It’s the only green barbecue sauce I know of,” he said.
I didn’t notice Brunswick stew on the menu, so I asked Lewis whether he might try his hand at the distinctive barbecue specialty of Georgia. He professed ignorance. “Is it like hash?” he said, mentioning the mushy Carolina barbecue sidekick usually served over rice with a mustard sauce. I assured him that stew was quite different from hash.
“I don’t get eating a barbecue side dish that has more meat,” he said. “I think I’ll stay in my lane.”
Photograph by Growl Bros.
Lewis isn’t just opening a restaurant in Atlanta; he moved here. Last summer he relocated from Charleston, and now he’s scouting around for a house to buy. He’s engaged to be married and plans to set a date after the opening rush dies down. He and his partners plan to launch another restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, this year—they already have one in Greenville, South Carolina—amounting to four, which he thinks may be enough.
In the meantime, he’s getting to know his new home base. He mentioned that he had gone to The Varsity and didn’t care for the hamburgers and the brusque way he was treated. “They were rude. They yelled at me.”
I assured him that the counter people at The Varsity shout at everyone; it’s part of the performance. And I suggested that he should have ordered chili dogs.
“Well, I wish someone had told me.”
Lewis doesn’t care for Atlanta traffic, but he appreciates other things about his adopted city—especially the food scene.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I’m not even sure I like brisket anymore,” he said. “I’ve cooked so much of it. When I’m not eating sushi or salad, I love Thai and Indian food. There’s not much of that in Charleston. I think it’s really cool that there’s such a variety of food here.”
Now Lewis and his exemplary brisket are part of that variety. Good for us. As Steven Raichlen, the cookbook author and TV chef, wrote on his Barbecue Bible website, “Atlanta’s barbecue scene got a huge boost with the arrival of John Lewis.”
This article appears in our March 2026 issue.
