All It Takes Is All You Got

November 3, 2026Russell Worth Parker, Editor in Chief

Friends Old, New, and Soon to Be,

Twenty-five years and twenty-five pounds ago, I leaned forward in the webbed seats of a military cargo plane, watching the rear clamshell doors open. The moon seemed to hover just outside, its ghostly light washing across our faces. Only our eyes were visible above the rubber masks feeding us the supplemental oxygen required at altitude in an unpressurized aircraft, so we communicated by signal. Standing on command, our legs inhibited by the heavy rucksacks hanging upside down across them, we shuffled towards the plane’s back ramp and the earth thousands of feet below. Parachute training is always a team exercise in calculating and controlling risk, an event managed by experienced and capable experts. But upon departing the aircraft, any problems are your own, with the remainder of your life to solve them. Decades of high-risk training left me fascinated by individual risk tolerances. Perhaps that is why I admire people who bet on themselves. Hector Garate, owner and pitmaster of Palmira Barbecue in Charleston, South Carolina, who recently brought one of his smokers and the magic he creates within to Tom Beckbe’s Birmingham store, is one of them.

Garate’s figurative departure from the plane came amidst a global pandemic. “I started doing barbecue in my backyard, smoking in a small Oklahoma Joe, like you get in a Home Depot or Lowe's. From there, I started cooking brisket. Some of my friends own a farm, and we would start the fire at four in the morning, harvest a hog, and clean them up. The family would do sausage, and I started cooking the whole hog. Once I turned out my first fire, I thought, I want to do this forever.”

Carolina whole hog is where Garate has made his name and his living. But to do so, he had to learn another skill in which he’s become an artisan: pit building. “I figured out that I needed bigger vessels to cook because I needed to make [my capabilities] bigger. So I got on YouTube and spent a month learning how to weld. Then I was looking for parts to build my first smoker, a 330-gallon Texas-style offset.” Now he has, among others, four 1000-gallon smokers supporting daily operations and a rig designed to evoke the upland hunting his Spanish ancestors practiced, built to resemble shotgun shells with brass accents and engraved sideplates calling to mind a custom English shotgun. But first, he worked with old propane tanks.

Soon, Garate was famous in Charleston for his barbecue pop-ups, standing room only affairs in which the developing pitmaster blended his Puerto Rican roots in a family lechonera smoking one hundred pigs at once, with his life in the Carolinas, a place with defined barbecue traditions. People were immediately wowed. But like departing an aircraft mid-flight, entrepreneurship is a never-ending exercise in problem-solving. Garate remembers, “I did pop-ups for three years. In the beginning, all you see is darkness. You wake up every morning to be the dishwasher, the pitmaster, the meat slicer, meat cutter, the cashier, whatever.” Then, in 2024, Garate opened the doors of Palmira, named after his great-grandmother, and “the light came through.”

Thinking back to my own first career, one born of passionate dedication to a discipline, I remember something we used to say: “All it takes is all you got.” It’s a succinct way of expressing what it takes to make something challenging manifest in your life, and Garate has his own version: “You can’t fake doing this. You either do it or you don't.” He continues, “Just because you’re a great chef doesn’t mean you can be a great pitmaster. You have to babysit meat, you have to have patience, you have to understand fire.” You certainly can’t fake your way in a world built on objective production and subjective taste.

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Garate had to learn lessons in a few years that many famous pitmasters spend decades compiling. Asked for one, he told me, “Acidity is huge. When you cook a hog, it needs to be high quality and have a lot of fat content, because fat is flavor. But also, you need a lot of acidity to cut into it. When you combine those two things properly, and you understand how to use them, you have this world-class whole hog. The care that you put into something can elevate anything.” That passion for the work, for the small details, and the hard work to make it happen results in a peak experience for anyone who loves fire and spice and meat. It all reminds me of something else we said in my old job: “Do you want to talk about it or do you want to be about it?”

But barbecue is not the only thing Garate is “about”. He’s an ardent quail hunter who loves working with his German Shorthair. “I just like seeing the dog work; picking up scent and then pointing, that's the biggest thing. I can shoot a bird, but that doesn't press my skills. Understanding and working with your partner and seeing her reach these milestones, that's what drives me the most.” It’s a passion that drives him to describe his perfect day as “Waking early in the morning, getting a cup of coffee, and just seeing the guys. Then start hunting. It's really not even about shooting birds to me. It's just about the whole process and what you're thinking about in that moment.”

It’s an easy metaphor for the passion that’s made him famous. Asked about hunting as an analogue to running those four 1000-gallon pits, Garate says, "It's the same thing, actually. You're by yourself cooking. You're only thinking about that fire, and about that meat at that moment. For twelve hours, you're not thinking about anything else. With hunting, you don't care about the phone; you don't care about anything but having a good time with the dogs and shooting some birds. There's nothing else.” His is a focus of which Garate says, “It takes a specific type of mentality to be able to say, I'm going to do this, and that's it. You can be a great cook, and you can be really organized, and you can run a kitchen perfectly. But that doesn't mean you have what it takes to open a restaurant. Can you take on a million in debt? Do you believe in yourself that much?” Thankfully, Garate did and does.

About the Author

Russell Worth Parker, Editor in Chief

In addition to serving as the Editor in Chief of the Tom Beckbe Field Journal, Russell Worth Parker is a retired United States Marine and freelance writer living in Wilmington, NC, with his wife and daughter. Worth writes for a wide array of publications, including The New York Times, Garden and Gun Magazine, Salvation South, Southlands, and the members' magazines of most of your favorite conservation organizations. You can find him at EAL@tombeckbe.com.