The Pitts Killer BBQ Food Truck, Richmond's Best Smoked Meat, and the History Behind Every Bite

If you've spent any time in Richmond, Virginia, you've probably heard about The Pitts Killer BBQ food truck.

If you haven't eaten there yet, fix that immediately. Slow-smoked, deeply seasoned, the kind of barbecue that makes you stop mid-bite—The Pitts has built a devoted following in Richmond for good reason.

But barbecue in America—especially in the South—carries a history that goes a lot deeper than the pit. Understanding that history makes the food taste different. Not better, not worse. Just more honest.

Richmond is a city that is still reckoning with what it was. It was the largest slave market in the Upper South, the capital of the Confederacy, and the place where some of the most extraordinary acts of resistance in American history happened, quietly, in churches and back rooms and half-acre lots.

When you eat barbecue in a Southern city like Richmond, you are eating food shaped almost entirely by African American culinary tradition—a tradition born in forced labor, perfected under brutal conditions, and passed down through generations in spite of everything working against it.

TAKE A SELF-GUIDED TOUR OF RICHMOND

Before or after you track down The Pitts Killer BBQ food truck, consider taking Richmond's Slavery to Emancipation Walking Tour—a self-guided audio tour available on the WalknTours app.

The tour covers 1.5 miles through Shockoe Bottom and Capitol Square, with sixteen stops and narration by guide Greg. It tells you what Richmond actually was, who built it, who was sold in it, and who fought back.

The tour starts at Libby Prison and the Virginia Holocaust Museum and it takes you through the auction sites and slave trading firms on Main and 15th Streets. You'll stand at the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground, where the people sold on these streets were buried.

You'll visit the site of Lumpkin's Slave Jail—the Devil's Half Acre, turned into a university by the woman who survived it, and finally, walk Capitol Square and hear the story of Barbara Johns, the sixteen-year-old who changed constitutional law

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN ROOTS OF AMERICAN BARBECUE

Barbecue as Americans know it—low and slow, wood-smoked, built around flavor that develops over hours—was developed and refined almost entirely by enslaved African Americans.

On plantations across the South, enslaved people were assigned to cook for large gatherings, managing whole-animal cooking over open pits for sometimes hundreds of people at a time.

They brought with them techniques from West and Central Africa, where pit cooking and smoke preservation had been practiced for generations.

The cuts of meat they worked with were the cuts nobody else wanted—ribs, shoulders, brisket, the parts that required long cooking to become tender. They made those cuts extraordinary.

The knowledge was passed down through families, through communities, through oral tradition, and through the kind of cooking that happens when skilled people are given nothing and make something remarkable from it.

BBQ IN RICHMOND: A CITY WITH A HISTORY

Richmond's relationship with food—like its relationship with everything—is shaped by its history as a slave-trading city.

The 17th Street Market, one of the oldest continuously operating markets in Virginia, was a place where free Black vendors sold produce and enslaved people were sent to buy and sell on behalf of their enslavers. Food was one of the few spaces in antebellum Richmond where Black Richmonders had any economic presence at all.

After emancipation, Black-owned restaurants, food trucks, and catering businesses became part of Richmond's fabric. The barbecue tradition that developed in Virginia—vinegar-forward, pork-centered, deeply smoked—owes its character almost entirely to African American pitmasters whose names are largely lost to history.

The Pitts Killer BBQ food truck sits in that tradition. It is Richmond barbecue, made in a city that is finally starting to acknowledge whose hands built it.

WHERE TO FIND THE PITTS KILLER BBQ FOOD TRUCK

The Pitts Killer BBQ food truck operates in Richmond, Virginia. Check their social media for current location and hours—food trucks move, and their schedule varies. They are worth tracking down. Once you find them, order everything that sounds good. You will not regret it.

PLAN YOUR TRIP

Richmond's Slavery to Emancipation Walking Tour is available now on the WalknTours app. Download the app, search for the tour, and you're ready to go—no advance booking required.

For everything else you need to plan your visit, including where to stay, where to eat, and what to see beyond the tour, check out the Richmond, VA Travel Guide on WalknTours.com.