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“Let ‘em eat!” McKnight would roar as orders flooded in. The others rose up to meet his expectations.” The people around him don’t want to let him down.

That food quality was never going to waver as long as he was there. “The danger we learned was you can have too much success if you can’t handle it.

They had no idea McKnight was about to transform their lives.Ī sign at Red Hot & Blue’s Annapolis location pays tribute to Sonny McKnight Courtesy of Joel Wood At that time, partners Joel Wood, Friedman, Moore, future Tennessee governor Don Sundquist knew they wanted a local joint to eat barbecue, listen to blues, and meet friends. Weeks after Moore’s cumbersome initial job offers, McKnight called with a request to see the proposed restaurant space on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington. He liked to tell stories about a long cooking career that included preparing kosher food and cooking big Italian meals in the home of an organized crime boss who asked his dinner guests to lay their guns on the table. … It all came from a place of love.”īorn in Sumter, South Carolina, McKnight first learned to cook from his mother. “Everybody that worked for Sonny, with Sonny, and around Sonny just felt better because he was there. “It would just feel better,” says Janis, who was a manager from 2008 to 2010. Ron Janis knew if McKnight was in the kitchen from the moment he walked into the location he managed in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

He would not just teach recipes, he was magnetic and personable. “When I visited restaurants around the nation, people would ask about Sonny. “You could just sense the energy level in the kitchen,” Red Hot & Blue co-founder Bob Friedman says. But saying goodbye to someone who brightened their days so much is still hard to swallow. There was a retirement party for him two years ago at the chain’s Laurel, Maryland, restaurant. McKnight’s death resonated with his former friends, co-workers, and bosses after a 30-year career with Red Hot & Blue. King, Isaac Hayes, Joe Cocker, Ronnie Wood, Rufus Thomas, and Lee Atwater, an investor in the restaurant better known as a Republican strategist and campaign manager for George H.W. Two-hour lines formed on Monday nights for the 86-seat Rosslyn restaurant for McKnight’s ribs and late-night blues led by touring legends like B.B. Within two months, the Rosslyn, Virginia, restaurant received major recommendations by the Washington Post and Washingtonian magazine food critics. Red Hot & Blue made Memphis barbecue a hit attraction around Washington when it opened in 1988. McKnight became their pit master and the principal force behind the restaurant. “He thought I was an undercover IRS agent trying to set him up,” Moore says.Īt the time, Moore and his three partners were starting a restaurant even though they had no food experience between them beyond working as a busboy. McKnight’s employer was having legal problems, and he was paranoid something else was going on.

When Moore showed up to the food court to offer McKnight a job, the cook didn’t believe the opportunity was real. The relationship that would spark McKnight’s career got off to an awkward start. He had the best work ethic I’ve ever seen in my life.” “He was doing absolutely everything,” Moore says. McKnight went by “Sonny,” but his boss liked to call him “the Blur.” He was 74.Ī short, wiry man, McKnight spent more than 50 years in kitchens, working with a level of speed and enthusiasm that immediately caught the attention of Wendell Moore, a co-founder of the hickory-burning, Memphis-style barbecue restaurant that scouted McKnight while he was working at a downtown food court. Ernest McKnight, the pitmaster and executive chef who helped grow Red Hot & Blue from a Rosslyn, Virginia, barbecue joint to an international chain in the 90s, died of lung cancer January 17.