Dominique Leach Is Staking a Claim for Black Women in the Barbecue World

The Friday lunch hour at Lexington Betty Smokehouse in Chicago’s historic Pullman neighborhood exudes the energy of an unofficial town square. City workers and families chat over trays of smoked brisket, snappy andouille sausages, and maple syrup-doused candy yams that taste like Saturday morning pancakes. A shuttle bearing 20-odd executives from Leadership Greater Chicago, a civic leadership development organization, pulls up for a catered lunch meeting. While I chat with Lexington Betty’s chef and co-owner, Dominique Leach, on the patio, Alderman Anthony Beale waves and hollers through the open window of his SUV, en route to grab lunch. A National Parks Service worker polishes off his salmon burger then approaches Leach to ask if she might be available for an upcoming cookout fundraiser. 

“You better be grilling my Wagyu hot dogs there!” Leach replies with a wry grin. She’s referencing her namesake line of Michigan-raised Wagyu beef franks that rolled out across all 44 Chicagoland Mariano’s grocery stores (and nationwide online) in January. Inside, co-owner Tanisha Griffin (who is Leach’s wife), runs the show and oversees prep for dinner service: sheet trays packed with trimmed pork ribs and chicken thighs await their house seasoning rubs before hitting the Southern Pride smoker. 

This is Leach’s comfort zone, even if her path didn’t always lead here. 

It might surprise you to learn that this Chicago-born pitmaster’s background wasn’t in the city’s best barbecue joints, but rather in the events kitchens of fine-dining institutions like Spiaggia, the Four Seasons Hotel, and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

“In this moment, it all makes sense — my background, how I got to this,” she tells me, taking in the sizable cross-section of the neighborhood represented at her humming restaurant. “I love doing this. It feels like the right mix of my fine-dining background and that nurturing, family-style aspect.”

Leach grew up in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood with a single working mom who had precious little time to cook. She looked forward to her grandmother Betty King’s twice-annual visits, when King would fill every burner on the stovetop with pots of greens and her famous oxtail stew while the sweet aromas of her scratch-made cornbread issued from the oven. A native of Lexington, Mississippi, King raised her family in Chicago before moving back to Lexington in her 60s. Leach took up cooking during her tight-knit family’s annual Independence Day barbecue, an extra celebratory event since it occurred the day before Leach’s birthday. 

“The barbecue gatherings were so important, with everybody — aunts, uncles, cousins — all piling into my mom’s place because we had a huge yard,” Leach recalls. “It was such a task; everyone had to help out in some aspect. We’d all be in the kitchen making spaghetti Bolognese and mac and cheese, cutting watermelon, or rotating turns on the grill doing rib tips, smoking the chicken, or making the hot dogs. Eventually, I had a rotation on the grill.”

‘They see you eventually’

Leach graduated from high school at 16, and attended culinary school at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Art. She interned at Chicago’s Standard Club and began her career at the Renaissance hotel. By this point, she had already become accustomed to being the youngest (and only) Black woman on the line. But she was eager to learn and advance beyond garde manger — the cooking station where women were generally placed if not in pastry, she says. She showed up early. She fried latkes faster than her peers, and spoke up when the tenderloin needed seasoning.

“Something about the culinary industry — [that was] apparent in culinary school and out in the field — was that the boys are in charge,” Leach says. “As a Black, queer woman, I was going to have to show up and work harder to get people’s attention. I didn’t let it discourage me. They see you eventually.”

Still, ascending the ranks to sous chef at both the Art Institute of Chicago and Paramount Events, and then to executive chef at Zelda’s Kosher Catering, was a lonely journey. Leach longed for a mentor who looked like her, to whom she could share her ideas and doubts. Instead, she became that for herself, making an unlikely mantra out of advice her brother gave her back in 2007. 

“I was just a young cook complaining, and he was like, ‘They don’t care about what you think. You just need to get in there and do your job,’” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Man, that’s harsh!’ Then I literally would tell myself that in moments, like a coaching mechanism. I put my head down and learned my worth.”

By the time she got to the Four Seasons, she knew it would be the last time she worked for someone else. In 2016 she and Griffin started catering parties and weddings on the side, but it was hard to build a following. Then Leach heard an interview in which the rapper Ludacris talked about getting started by selling tapes out of his car in his neighborhood. “I was like, if I can get the attention of the Black and urban community, I can build off of that.” 

And what the community couldn’t get enough of was barbecue. So she drew up a few barbecue-centric business plans before settling on smoked meats and soulful sides. 

Chicago barbecue is special, if maybe underrated nationally. Its roots are in the Great Migration in the 1950s, when Black families moved from the South to northern industrial cities like Chicago for work, bringing along their Southern-inflected barbecue secrets. The city might be best known for rib tips smothered in barbecue sauce (often served atop a pile of fries) and smokey hot links.

Leach describes her style as a combination of Memphis and North Carolina influences with a bit of Chicago thrown in. Her first task was perfecting smoked brisket — which she rubs with a housemade seasoning mix before giving it 10 low-and-slow hours in the smoker. She developed two house rubs, which go on everything from rib tips to smoked chicken, along with a pair of sauces that blend sweetness, vinegary bite and heat. Her smoky andouille sausages are likewise masterfully balanced, flavored with garlic, onion, tangy mustard, treacly molasses and a fiery hint of cayenne.

The cooking part was easy; after all, she was a great chef by now. But launching her business was another story.

From the ashes

Like a lot of Black entrepreneurs in America, Leach couldn’t get a bank loan to start her business without using the building she owned for collateral, so instead she used money she’d saved to buy a food truck in June 2017. Late one night a few months later, it was set on fire.

“My wife was in the living room watching TV when it happened,” she recounts. “I was asleep, and I just remember hearing her running toward me hyperventilating, like, ‘The food truck, the food truck is on fire!”’ And I jumped up and went to the window, and the food truck was on fire right outside the house.”

Wracked with anxiety and fear over who’d commit an act so personal, Leach got to work piecing her business and life back together — but she wasn’t alone. Griffin left her successful career as a loan company branch manager to help her wife rebuild Lexington Betty full time. Friends and the community showed up, offering support and checks and couches to sleep on when the couple moved out of their home following advice from the police. 

The women replaced the truck in 2018, and started doing pop-ups before debuting their first brick-and-mortar location in the city’s Galewood neighborhood in early 2019. They followed with a stall at the One Eleven food hall in 2020, as part of a pilot project to help promote Black-owned businesses in the region, and added a third location in the medical district soon thereafter. After the One Eleven’s two other occupants left in 2020 due to the pandemic, the building’s owners offered Lexington Betty the chance to take over the space. Now the restaurant’s sole brick-and-mortar location, it opened in 2022.

Yet again, Leach finds herself the sole Black queer woman in another boys’ club, though her restaurant kitchen doesn’t reflect the historically macho realm of regional barbecue. Alongside Griffin, supervisors Shay Ashaye and Erika Hamrick and sous chef Lilia Trejo complete this all-Black, all-women management team.

“Fortunately, I’m so used to operating the way I do, I’m not looking for validation from anyone,” Leach says. “But I suddenly looked up, and males in the industry are certainly paying attention.”

Lexington Betty started winning local and national accolades for its barbecue; articles referred to Leach as a pitmaster, “which was not even in my vocabulary,” she quips. She earned a spot to compete on Food Network’s “Chopped,” and has since appeared as a judge and contestant on Food Network Canada’s “Fire Masters.” She’s fortunate to have a team she trusts at the restaurant, as she’s lately spent far less time there — in and out of meetings as she builds out her retail business with additional products, making appearances at local events and on TV, and leaving town for a month at a time to film cooking shows like season four of Food Network’s BBQ Brawl. 

Leach is embracing this evolution of her career. After all, building the Dominique Leach brand is all part of the plan to leave her stamp on the industry as a public figure and role model for young Black folks in need of a positive example. 

“It’s unfortunate that I look around Black communities and I see a lack of hope because there’s a lack of examples,” she says. 

As I get ready to leave, I hug the real Leach a few feet from a cutout of her wearing the same chef’s uniform and broad smile. The strangest part about this moment is that it’s not strange at all — more like a joyful metaphor for Leach’s rise. 

She hands me a to-go bag bearing her creamy, not-too-sweet banana pudding, because I’ve eaten far too much tender brisket and braised collards to manage another bite. She worries aloud that I don’t have enough water for the drive home. In that sense, Leach is still that kid in her backyard on the Fourth of July, making sure everyone’s had plenty to eat and feels at home. But she’s also a better version of herself, built by her and the community she surrounds herself with. 

“When people are around me or people read about me, what I hope they will take is that they can really be whatever it is they want to be in this life. It’s up to you to push through and become the best version of yourself on this planet,” she says. “So much of this journey has been so hard, but I didn’t stop. I really believed in and encouraged myself because I wasn’t hearing that at home. My mom was a busy woman in a survival-type environment. I recognize that I’m breaking that curse. I’m ready to be that example for other people.”