Melvin Bessinger Jr.
“People ask me for the recipe. I tell them: it's in the family, and it stays in the family.”
Melvin Bessinger Jr. carries forward the Bessinger family's mustard-sauce BBQ tradition — one of the most important culinary legacies in South Carolina. The Bessinger family has been making mustard sauce since the 1930s, and Melvin's on James Island is the most celebrated expression of that tradition. Melvin Jr. learned the recipe and the pit technique from his father, who learned it from his father before him. The sauce — tangy, golden, with a depth that comes only from decades of refinement — is bottled and sold across the Southeast.
Philosophy
The mustard sauce is the family recipe — you don't change it, you don't improve it, you just keep making it the right way. That's what people come for.
Technique
Whole hogs cooked on brick pits over hickory coals, served with the family's original mustard sauce recipe.
Recognition
- SC BBQ Association — Lifetime Achievement
- Charleston City Paper — Best BBQ (multiple years)