All of this really depends upon your intrepretation of both haute cuisine and barbecue. I'll start with barbecue. There are so many colorful opinions as to what the true origins of the term barbeque. You will get a different answer and a different recipe from every Southerner, Northerner and Texan you ask. The two leading theories have the word coming from either the French term barbe a queue or the Taino Indian word barbacoa.

Barbe a queue comes from French speaking Haitians who were fond of spit roasting whole animals over slow cooking fires. Barbe means whiskers and queue is the tail. Therefore barbe a queue describes whole animals that were skewered from their whiskers to their tail and spit roasted over a wood fire.

Others believe that barbeque is the Americanization of the Taino Indian term barbacoa, which means a framework of green wood built to slow cook fish and meats over an open wood fire. When the Spanish made their way from the West Indies to the shores of our nation they brought this technique of cooking. Barbacoa is still very popular in Mexican cooking.

In the early 1600’s it was illegal to carry a firearm to barbeques in Jamestown, Virginia. Probably even back then folks argued whether or not what they prepared was a true barbeque. The word barbeque shows up in George Washington’s 1769 dairy where he mentions that he traveled to Alexandria to attend a “barbicue”. The wilder and more colorful explanations have the term originating everywhere from an extinct tribe in Guyana that seemed to enjoy spit roasting captured enemies to a 19th century advertisement for a combination whiskey bar, beer hall, pool establishment and pig cooking restaurant that boasted Bar-Beer-Cue-Pig.

So can bbq be haute cuisine? - it already is.