Champion pitmaster Christopher Prieto cooks up steaks and spiritual encouragement at LU Convocation

In honor of tailgate season, Flames Football, and Homecoming this weekend, Liberty University welcomed champion pitmaster Christopher Prieto to give a cooking demonstration and discuss with students how he uses his work as a ministry.

Prieto is a nationally recognized pitmaster and was nominated for the 2025 James Beard Awards, one of the most prestigious awards for culinary excellence. He is the owner of Prime Barbecue in Knightdale, N.C., and has appeared on many cooking shows and competitions, like “Chopped: Grill Master,” “Meat Masters,” “BBQ Brawl,” and more.

President Dondi E. Costin and his wife, Vickey, interviewed Prieto as he cooked two ribeye steaks on a stage decorated in tailgate fashion. Prieto said his love for barbecue started as a way to honor his own father, who also loved barbecue. But as Prieto grew in his career, he knew that something was missing from his life.

“There’s a lot of failure in barbecue. You don’t just magically cook a great steak; you have to cook a lot of bad steaks to get that great steak,” he said. “And it wasn’t until I started becoming a champion in this one area (barbecue), that I found how much the world falls short and how much I can fall short.”

He recalled a former busser who made him angry because he was always joyful — a feeling Prieto said he could never attain.

“As hard of a day as I made for him, he still found joy in his day. And through that, we developed a relationship,” he said. “He helped me acknowledge the way of my sin and that (barbecue) will never bring me joy because I’m always making just a meal, and you’re always going to have another meal, but Jesus is the fulfillment that we seek.”

As Prieto talked, he demonstrated his process for cooking a ribeye steak and gave tips, like ensuring the meat is dry, using tallow to bind the steak together, the best way to season it, how long to cook it, and finishing it with a compound butter (a butter mixed with other ingredients). At the end of the demonstration, he served Costin and Vickey portions of the steak and tossed out slices to the audience.

“One of the greatest gifts barbecue does is it brings people together,” he said. “It’s this powerful tool that just even the presence of charcoal in the air, even in this room, it triggered memories. It triggers just the love and passion of being around a barbecue grill, cooking with your family, having cookouts. And this I believe you need to have as a great evangelistic tool. If you can cook the best steak in your neighborhood, in your dorm, you’re going to be the most popular person, and you’re going to invite people to come enjoy that with you.”

Costin asked Prieto how he uses his work to worship and how students can apply that to their own lives.

“I really truly feel we all have a gift, and when we leverage it for the Kingdom, we truly see the profit in that,” Prieto said. “I can build the best restaurant that’s ever lived, I can achieve every great thing in cooking, but the things is, when I fell to my knees and accepted Christ into my heart, we made a transaction: all of my sin, all of it, all the filth I carried, all the bad decisions I made, all of it, (in exchange) to follow Him and make disciples.”

Prieto said he wants to build relationships with the people he works with and serves, because though he could be the best at barbecue, his whole day is focused on bringing people to the Lord. When guests tour the pits at his restaurant, for example, he uses the fire in the pits as a bridge to talking about the Gospel.

“You can live the most perfect lives you can live … but unless you are forged by this fire, by this consistent fire, a different creation will never come out of that barbecue pit. It’s that consistent fire that crafts that barbecue,” he said.

Prieto said Psalm 107:9, which is written on part of his restaurant’s ceiling, also sparks conversation.

“(Psalm 107:9) speaks so intimately to me, because that was me before Christ. Every day, trying to be satisfied, all my barbecue trying to satisfy people, knowing that no matter how perfect I make it, they are going to eat another meal, that will never be enough,” he said. “But everything beyond that tray can fulfill their longing; how I serve them, how Christ loves me and I love them, how I wash their feet when they come to the door, how I steward my business in the community, how I steward and love my employees. All those things are a reflection of Christ’s love within me.”

The business also has a full-time chaplain for guests interested in following up in discipleship.

Prieto said he leads in a servant fashion, noting he’s constantly on the floor and engaging with his customers and employees.

“When people come into my restaurant, the expectation is the gracious and excellence of what I can provide to them,” he added. “But that’s because I work for Christ, and that should be the expectation.”

Prieto said he has one-on-ones with the chaplains and surrounds himself with strong leadership who can speak into his life and his ministry.

Pietro also volunteers with the Gideons, putting Bibles in hotels, a place with the highest statistical rate of suicide. He said 40 percent of the people who die by suicide in hotel rooms have a Bible open next to them when they die.

“Forty percent of people are trying to grasp that last little bit before they make that decision,” he said, adding that many people don’t know where to start reading the Bible. “Every time you go to a hotel room, take color tabs with you, think of five important verses that really pierced your heart. Highlight those, so as they reach or open that drawer, they see that Bible tabbed, and they open that book, and that Scripture pierces their heart. And I really think something can happen from that. If this entire room did one Bible all around the world, we can strategically together evangelize in a very specific way.”