Lewis Donald

Lewis Donald can’t cut into a radish without thinking of his grandfather.

Growing up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, Donald wasn’t the best student in the classroom, but he could spend all day studying the rows of vegetables in the garden his granddad Ray planted every year. He was just a teenager when Ray gave him the advice that shaped his life: “Lewis, you need to find something to do with your hands.”

Donald has lived in six different states since then, mastering numerous cuisines as a cook and chef at restaurants, country clubs, resorts, and a specialty food store. In Sweet Lew’s, he fulfills his dream of running a classic barbecue shack.

Donald crystallized his love for barbecue in the mid-2000s, while working at the Greenbrier Resort alongside championship pit master Ken Hess. Every weekend, Hess fired up the smoker at his house in the tiny mountain town of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and invited Donald and other resort staffers over with their families for a big meal.

With Sweet Lew’s, he takes the lessons from all of those travels and distills them into a simple menu that reflects not just North Carolina’s culinary history, but also the belief that’s driven him since the days in his grandfather’s garden: The best food makes you feel right at home.