Luis Rivera Rodríguez is sitting on a picnic table in the Texas sun, watching his offset smoker cook brisket, listing out the biographies of the contestants on the new season of Netflix’ Barbecue Showdown. There’s the pitmaster who holds the title of “national pork champion.” There’s a personal chef to Oprah. There’s the guy who gave a TED talk about barbecue, and the guy whose family owns seven restaurants. There’s the cookbook writer who’s done more than anyone in America to preserve the traditions of campfire cowboy cooking.
And then there’s Luis, a normal guy with a government job who smoked meat in his backyard for fun. Luis, who just about one month ago—months after filming Barbecue Showdown—moved from Chicago to Dallas and started his first-ever barbecue business.
“When we get there, we do a meet-and-greet,” Rivera says of filming the show. “Everyone’s like, ‘Do you have a food truck?’ Mm-mm. ‘Do you cater?’ Nope! ‘Did you go to culinary school?’” (He shakes his head.) “I actually asked one, ‘Are you a judge?’ They’re like, ‘No, we’re competing.’ Oh my god!”
What is this backyard warrior doing on Netflix? Actually, what is he doing in Dallas? Born in Venezuela and raised in Chicago, he goes by the name Meat Papi and serves smoked meats in bowls that mix together all the strands of his life story. Starting in mid-June, Meat Papi became the resident chef at Outfit Brewing. His smoker is lit every Thursday through Sunday.
Unlike most barbecue operations that go by the slice or the plate, Meat Papi serves up bowls. Rivera piles chopped barbecue onto cilantro rice, then adds garnishes that tells the story of his identity.
“I want to bring la cultura to my dishes, where it’s a little bit of me,” he explains. “To Venezuelans, I’m not really a Venezuelan because I was raised here. Here, they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re a foreigner.’ But then I was raised around Mexicans, and when I speak Spanish, a lot of them are like, ‘You’re saying Mexican words but you’re not Mexican.’ And some of my dishes are Puerto Rican, I make a Puerto Rican rice. I’m a melting pot, man.”
What’s all that taste like? My lechón bowl tasted of sunlight and relaxed vibes. The pulled pork has a gentle kiss of smoke, and the cilantro rice is mellow, too. On that base, though, comes Rivera’s vivid rainbow of garnishes. In addition to a bright cabbage slaw, he adds three sauces: drizzles of Mexican crema, his own barbecue sauce, and a green sauce that’s a riff on avocado-based Venezuelan guasacaca.
The result is a $10 barbecue bowl that’s filling, but not over-the-top. I didn’t spend the afternoon napping or lapping up pints of water. I should mention that Meat Papi accepts cash or the various cash transfer apps, not credit.
Rivera says an affordable price is important to him. “My goal here is you get a bowl of whatever you want and a beer and it’s under $20. Can I make more and charge more? Of course I can. But if I can still make a profit and give you quality food that I made from scratch—everything besides the crema, everything is from me, it’s myself on the dish.”
To keep things affordable and simple, he keeps his menu tight. Besides the lechón, his other main bowl features Texas brisket. Don’t like rice? Get one of the meats on nachos instead. There will be more items on the menu as word travels and Meat Papi gets busier: Friday arepas, birria, and a chili that he cooked on the Netflix show. (Just so you’re warned: it has beans. “It’s not Texas chili,” he says, “but it’s very Latino.”)
But how did Meat Papi get here, and how did he handle appearing on TV alongside those professionals?
Rivera started working for the state of Illinois at age 18, straight out of high school. “But Latino families, man,” he says. “My dad was a pastor. We were always feeding people.” His brother first got him experimenting in the kitchen. Then, when the pandemic hit, Rivera’s job sent him home and gave him a whole lot of new time. Eventually, he signed up for a job with a friend traveling the country “repairing big-ass pumps,” a job that became like a road trip, taking the duo to Idaho, Texas, and the Atlantic coast.
“I called myself the bootleg Bourdain because I went to every little hole in the wall,” he says. “I didn’t want to go to, you know, Terry Black’s. That’s fine, but I wanted mom-and-pop barbecue.”
Back home, he started smoking meat seriously for the first time, inspired by his heritage and his stops on the road trip. He didn’t apply to Netflix at first. After he posted a pork-pulling video on TikTok, a producer slid into his DMs. He thought it was a scam, so they tried again, offering to FaceTime to prove themselves. That started the whole year-long process: becoming one of 27,000 applicants, holding interviews while cooking meals to demonstrate skills, and eventually being flown to Georgia for unaired challenges that whittled a final group of 15 down to nine contestants who would go on camera.
Barbecue Showdown has been one of the best new cooking shows to air anywhere in recent years. In its kindness, warmth, and close attention to detail, it’s the true American counterpart to The Great British Bake Off. The contestants almost always seem to genuinely care for each other, a trend that reached its peak when season 2’s finale featured two worthy competitors who had also become close, supportive friends. There’s no manufactured drama, no artificial animosity, no setting contestants up to fail.
That support helped Rivera survive in front of the cameras. After that first meet-and-greet, surrounded by some of his heroes and stricken by impostor syndrome, he was dejected.
“I literally felt like trash,” he remembers of the conversation where the other guests found out he was an amateur. “The producer, I think, overheard it. He came up to me and said, ‘There’s a reason you’re here. We don’t just pick people to fail. The reason is that you are talented just as much as all of these guys. This is an equal playing field. We don’t set nobody up.’”
Obviously, Rivera can’t tell us how he did—the season premieres on July 4—but he was filming for several weeks. He also had time to form close friendships with the other contestants, who include cowboy cook Kent Rollins, acclaimed Egyptian American pitmaster Kareem El-Ghayesh (of Austin’s KG BBQ), Houston food truck owner Sloan Rinaldi, two competitors from Louisiana, and one each from Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
“We all became so close,” Rivera says. “I cooked with KG in Miami. I’m going to be cooking with him for Formula 1 in Austin.”
And he’s cooking for Dallas permanently now. After filming ended, Rivera had a conversation with one of his childhood best friends: Zach Flagg, Outfit’s operations manager. Outfit’s patio was Rivera’s for the taking. He packed his bags and his smoker and moved to Texas this spring.
“I’m well aware it’s going to be slow to start with, but I’m excited,” he says. He brought a lifetime with him to serve on the plate: a little bit of Venezuela, a little bit of Chicago, a little bit of Texas, and, maybe, a little bit of success on TV.
Outfit Brewing, 7135 John W. Carpenter Fwy.
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