May 11, 2026
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Bob Trudnak will represent Montgomery County on the Food Network cooking competition 'BBQ Brawl.' Its seventh season debuts Monday at 9 p.m.
In the age-old debate over which U.S. region smokes and grills the best barbecue, Texas, Memphis, Kansas City and the Carolinas come up a lot. Southeastern Pennsylvania rarely merits a mention.
Bob Trudnak is looking to put the area on the map. The Montgomery County pitmaster will compete for the Master of 'Cue title on the newest season of Food Network's "BBQ Brawl," premiering Monday at 9 p.m. He's one of a dozen contestants hoping to impress the celebrity chefs leading the teams — Bobby Flay, Brooke Williamson and Maneet Chauhan — as well as the judges. That panel is made up of Season 3 winner Rashad Jones, chef and cookbook author Adrienne Cheatham and TV personality Carson Kressley.
"I’m proud to represent the area, and I just hope that everybody in the area is proud of how I did," Trudnak said. "That's about it. It’s an emotional thing because it’s one of the world’s biggest barbecue stages."
The competition chef, who's 55, has spent decades on the grill, but his love of food and cooking goes back even further. Born into a large Lebanese and Italian family in Scranton, he remembers gathering for feasts at his grandmother's house every week after Sunday church service. He left Lackawanna County at the age of 20 to attend the Art Institute of Philadelphia, which brought him into the orbit of "Shotgun Fred" Pirkle.
The Texas transplant was an inventor who created temperature-control valves and systems. Though Pirkle initially hired Trudnak for a marketing and design position at his Warminster company ThermOmegaTech, the pair eventually collaborated on an electronic device to regulate barbecue cookers' temperatures. The concept spun off into a whole line of products under a new brand, BBQ Guru, and helped push Trudnak into the competition world. Both his mentors — Shotgun Fred and his grandmother — showed up in his emerging style.
"The outdoor grilling and the slow-cooked barbecue came from Fred, and really understanding what true Southern barbecue is all about," Trudnak said. "But as I evolved as a cook, I came to look back on my roots a little bit and started incorporating those Mediterranean flavors and Middle Eastern flavors."
Trudnak considers sauces one of his secret weapons. He sells a line of them (and seasonings) under the Bobby T’s Gourmet Foods banner. In his view, sauces help him stand out on the smoky stages of barbecue competitions, where he's racked up hundreds of awards.
"I really work hard at trying to make good chimichurri, good peri peri," Trudnak said. "How can I make a sauce that complements that grilled meat? In my experience, I’m a barbecue competition cook. I’ve been one for a long time. So I had perfected how to cook meats to the perfect tenderness, give them a bunch of flavor, but now how do I set myself apart? And that’s with a lot of these different world sauces."
Trudnak, who also runs the Hav’n a BBQ catering business out of Montgomery County, can't say much about how he did in the Food Network contest. He probably won't catch the first episode live, as he's flying out to Memphis on Monday night for the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. But he's available and eager to host watch parties in the region when he returns.
"When people hear I’m from the Philadelphia area, from Pennsylvania, they’re like, 'What do you know about barbecue?'" Trudnak said. "Well, it’s because of my experiences and traveling around the country and around the world. Barbecue has its own unique description everywhere you are. It could be hot dogs and hamburgers to somebody, it could be beef brisket to somebody else. It could be roasting a pig on a live fire. It could be seafood and grilling sauces. So to me, it’s all that. I just take what I like and work it my own way."
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