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Pitmaster Ted Liberda marinates his brisket “Thai style” for 36 to 48 hours in a veritable vat of fish sauce.
Liberda grew up barbecuing with his father, a Vietnam war veteran from Kansas, and crafting egg rolls with his mother, an emigré from Thailand, at the family’s restaurant.
Just outside of Kansas City, at his Overland Park restaurant Buck Tui BBQ, Liberda merges these roots into a menu that’s as much Thailand as it is classic American barbecue. His marinated brisket gets rubbed down in the restaurant’s “heavenly seasoning,” a mixture of coriander, ginger, and granulated garlic. Then they’re oak-smoked for 16 hours before christening dishes like the restaurant’s pad Thai and brisket rangoons, crispy envelopes of fried wonton stuffed with a peppery whipped cream cheese, so airy they might float away.
Liberda is a disciple of barbecue’s “third wave,” a growing cohort of first- and second-generation immigrants who are putting their own spin on America’s legacy with flavors from their home cultures. This third wave is not “fusion” food, its proponents will be quick to tell you. The word conjures a chef who throws together foods without concern for culture or tradition, says Liberda, who describes his fare as Kansas City barbecue with Thai inspiration. “It ain’t the case that we’re not authentic,” he adds. “We are authentic to what we do.”
Many of these third wave pitmasters are scrappy, self-taught, and hungry to redefine what makes American food “American.”
“When I first started, I got a lot of haters online saying, ‘Hey, you don’t know what American barbecue is,’” says Winnie Yee, owner of Smoke Queen Barbecue, an “unapologetically Chinese” barbecue joint in Garden Grove, California.
American barbecue has always been a unique mixture of cultures, predominantly Black, Indigenous, and European influences. At a time when immigrant communities are under threat—when running a restaurant can itself feel like an act of resistance—it’s not politically neutral to take a food that is thought of as classically American and innovate on it using flavors from farther afield.
In its first wave, regional techniques emerged and the “Barbecue Belt” was born: Memphis, Texas, Kansas City, and the Carolinas. The second wave crested with the craft barbecue renaissance of the 2010s, when pitmasters began treating cuts of meat with the reverence white-tablecloth restaurants reserved for seasonal produce. Now pitmasters like Yee and Liberda are ushering in barbecue’s third wave as a cuisine that has always been a vehicle for blending cultures.
