BBQ King started with Steve and Becky Abernethy, who opened the restaurant on September 1, 1971. Steve, known around Lincolnton as "The BBQ King," had already been smoking pork shoulders over hickory coals on a farm near Startown Road before the restaurant existed. He eventually built a smoke pit right inside the dining room so he wouldn't have to haul smoked shoulders in every day. That original pit is still there today, though it was retired from active use in 1987.
It's worth picturing what that actually looked like: a working smoke pit, live fire and all, sitting inside the same room where people ate their lunch. That's not a design choice a restaurant consultant would ever recommend, it's what a man who'd rather cook the food himself, right there, than haul it in from somewhere else, decided to build. The pit smoker BBQ King uses today sits just across the parking lot, a bigger operation for a bigger restaurant, but it exists because Steve solved a hauling problem the most direct way he knew how, by putting the fire where the food was going to be served.
Keith Smith joined the team at 15 years old back in 1976. Steve saw his potential early, and Keith eventually became manager and co-owner alongside Steve. Fifteen is young to start anywhere, let alone in a restaurant kitchen learning to hand-chop pork shoulders and hand-patty burgers under a founder who'd already built his own smoke pit by hand. Whatever Steve saw in him, it was enough to hand over real responsibility, first as manager, eventually as a full co-owner standing shoulder to shoulder with the man everybody in town already called The BBQ King.
Now Keith's own sons, Jordan and Jared, are fully involved in running the business. Generations, two families, one fire, carrying the same standards forward: hand-pattied burgers, hollered orders, and pork smoked low and slow over a real fire. That's the part that turns a restaurant into a family story instead of just a business with a founding date. Jordan and Jared grew up around the same counter their father started working behind as a teenager, and around the same smoke pit their father's mentor built with his own hands. They didn't inherit a brand so much as a set of standards, and by every indication those standards haven't loosened with each handoff.
They didn't inherit a brand so much as a set of standards, and by every indication those standards haven't loosened with each handoff.
It's a family business in the truest sense, not just in name on the sign out front. There's no corporate office, no franchise agreement, no private equity group deciding what corners can be cut to hit a margin target. It's generations, two families, and one fire, still hand-chopping around 25 pork shoulders and hand-breading about 200 pounds of onions every single day, the same way it's always been done. That's the whole philosophy, and it hasn't needed updating in over fifty years. When you order at the counter and your food gets hollered back to the kitchen, there's a real chance the person cooking it, or someone standing right next to them, shares a last name with the person who built the pit that started it all.
It's a family business in the truest sense, not just in name on the sign out front.