John Vest, owner of Redemption BBQ (Photo by Jay Paul)
There is something about barbecue that makes ministers out of mere men. A slab of meat sizzling over burning coals conjures imagery that is spiritual in nature, igniting memories of the enduring contributions of pitmasters past. John Vest, owner of Redemption BBQ, was a minister first and a pitmaster second — both roles born from a love of fellowship.
With a civil engineer for a father, Vest moved often as a kid, usually every 18 to 24 months until middle school, when his family settled in Florida. In college, Vest originally studied astrophysics, hoping to seek a career in space exploration. But through work with his church youth group, he says he felt called to the ministry. Switching to divinity school, Vest worked at churches in Chicago upon graduation, eventually earning a doctorate in ministry.
It was during his time in Chicago that he discovered his love for barbecue, occasionally cooking up smoky feasts for large youth-group gatherings. Growing up, Vest enjoyed a mishmash of barbecue styles from around the country, loosely inspired by the regional flavors of Georgia, Arkansas and Texas. It wasn’t until arriving in Richmond in 2015 with his wife and two sons for a teaching assignment at Union Presbyterian Seminary that Vest began to pursue the origins of the commonwealth’s native barbecue style, and his career as a pitmaster began to take root.
Now, he says he’s on a mission to redeem the local food system and the very notion of Virginia barbecue. For Vest, the commonwealth’s barbecue starts with ethically sourced ingredients, the very mission around which Redemption was built. “Farm-to-table eating shouldn’t be a niche,” Vest says. “It’s the way everything should be. The whole point of this venture, whether I succeed or fail, is I want to prove that you can have a barbecue business with locally, sustainably, humanely raised animals.”
After paying a visit to the South of the James Farmers Market, Vest says, “I started talking to the pig farmers there because I was wanting to cook barbecue, and it all started to click.”
On a Craigslist lark, the 43-year-old bought a used trailer, parking it in his backyard for a few years before deciding on his next step. In 2018, he launched Redemption BBQ, a food truck and catering business built around pit-cooked meats and ethically sourced ingredients, with pork as the star. Vest smokes Autumn Olive Farms pork shoulder in barrels of Virginia cherry wood to flavor hardwood lump coals, and on the truck, he chops the pork to order.
Cooking in barrels, says Vest, is one way of connecting to the Virginia barbecue of yore, when whole hogs were cooked in pits dug into the earth. “I like having the fire in there,” he says. “It connects with the meat in a different way. It creates a different bark on the meat and has a different smoke profile.”
“The whole point of this venture, whether I succeed or fail, is I want to prove that you can have a barbecue business with locally, sustainably, humanely raised animals.” — John Vest, owner of Redemption BBQ
Joseph Haynes, author of “Virginia Barbecue: A History,” has been influential in Vest’s quest for the state’s original ’cue style. “[Haynes] is kind of on this crusade to reclaim Virginia as a nationally known barbecue style, and I’m kind of into that,” Vest says.
That style is informed, in part, by the sauce, and Redemption offers three — Crossroads, Commonwealth and Unforbidden Fruit — always served on the side. Crossroads, Vest’s nod to the Southwestern region of Virginia, gets its cheek-puckering tanginess from mustard and vinegar and is best suited for mopping whole-hog barbecue. Commonwealth, on the other hand, speaks to the flavors of Virginia’s bygone barbecue, combining Vest’s own tomato ketchup with a pre-Colonial precursor to Worcestershire sauce called mushroom ketchup. Vest says he spent hours online watching people in Colonial garb make their own versions of mushroom ketchup before perfecting his recipe.
From the northeast corner of the commonwealth, Vest draws inspiration for Unforbidden Fruit, which marries his scratch-made tomato ketchup with Virginia apple butter, resulting in a thicker, sweeter sauce that’s tailor-made for Redemption’s pork barbecue, especially the baby back ribs.
The former pastor says creating authentic Virginia barbecue is as much about the meat itself as it is the cooking method and the sauce. For him, that means working with Autumn Olive Farms and sourcing pork that has been raised sustainably, with the pigs allowed to roam in the woods, just like they did in the early days of barbecue, before factory farms and commodity pork had been conceived.
“It’s definitely rare because people are so accustomed to barbecue being cheap,” explains Logan Trainum of Autumn Olive Farms, noting that “Heritage pork has way more flavor. ... The meat can shine.”
Vest strays only slightly from classic offerings, with a menu featuring a handful of nouveau-barbecue creations such as a Southern poutine, with pimento cheese and house-made tasso ham and andouille sausage; a gut-busting pork-fat-fried hot honey chicken sandwich; and chicken wings tossed in RVA Sweet Heat sauce, all good choices for crowds at the breweries where Redemption has gained a following. During the pandemic, however, Vest says he’s returned to the farmers market as a venue that connects him to “his people,” i.e., folks who have already bought into the idea of supporting the local food system.
For a recent transplant to Virginia, there’s something deeply personal in Vest’s pursuit of true Virginia barbecue — tied to a sense of place and connected with the past. “The earliest known Vests in our lineage ... were right here in Henrico County,” Vest says. “In kind of a weird way, because I grew up without a stable hometown, coming here felt like I was coming back to my ancestral home, and I’d like to believe that some Vest at some point put a pig in the ground.”
Never miss a Sunday Story: Sign up for the newsletter, and we’ll drop a fresh read into your inbox at the start of each week. To keep up with the latest posts, search for the hashtag #SundayStory on Twitter and Facebook.
