Chef Shalamar Lane ― The Journey from California BBQ to International Fame at Vivid Sydney 2024

By ShuRhonda Bradley, Columnist

This past May, My Father’s Barbecue’s chef and pitmaster, Shalamar Lane, was invited to Sydney, Australia to participate in Vivid Fire Kitchen, a segment of Vivid Sydney 2024. She was one of eight pitmasters and the second American participating in the event. Vivid Sydney 2024 combined light demonstrations, live music and food in Australia’s capital. The event was all about flame-seared street food from around the globe, all situated in Sydney’s foodie scene. 

The Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef has been an entrepreneur all her life, from selling her own freshly baked goods with her mother as a child to braiding hair as a Carson High School student. Lane’s entrepreneurial spirit, inherited from both sides of her family, led her to catering before she went to school to become a chef, even while working as a casual longshore worker. 

Chef Shalamar Lane owes her name to the 1970s R&B and Soul music band, Shalamar and her eldest brother and restaurant co-owner, Marvin Hardley Jr.,  who loved the band. If her parents had it their way, she would have been named Patricia.

Lane was born in California, but her people are from Alabama and East Texas. Specifically, her father’s family, the Hardleys, are from Bessemer, located near Birmingham. And her mom’s family is from an East Texas town called Tyler, 75 miles from the Louisiana border. It’s why My Father’s BBQ is where Alabama meets Texas in California.

The Hardleys had been opening up restaurants going back to when Shalamar’s lineage was still in Alabama, opening up restaurants in Compton, Harbor City, Long Beach and Wilmington — where a significant portion of Black Los Angeles resided from the 1950s through the ’80s.

The Hardleys and Clark’s California origin stories are like many African Americans who arrived after World War II in search of good union jobs, whether with the ILWU, the United Auto Workers, or the Teamsters in the Los Angeles Harbor.

Chef Lane describes herself as a daddy’s girl who learned all the tricks of the trade when it comes to barbecue and a lot of do-it-yourself repairs when he actively managed his rental properties. 

The Carson-based pitmaster also recalled being influenced by two aunts who both owned barbecue restaurants. They both died within the past seven years. It’s because of the deep family tradition that Lane has taken up the mantle and carried it on.

She said she gets her drive from her parents. Her mother worked for LA Unified for 50 years while her father worked as a longshore worker. She got her first job at the age of 15 working for McDonald’s. To incentivize work and saving, Shalamar recalled how her parents matched her bi-weekly paychecks.

“My mom said, ‘However much money you save, we’ll match it every month.’ So it was like, okay, if I got a little $200 check from McDonald’s … I was only making $4.25 in an hour,” Lane said.

When the ambitious entrepreneur came of age, her father used his membership to sponsor her so that she could work as a casual and eventually become a member of the ILWU. She began working on the waterfront in 1998 and over a grueling two-and-a-half years she worked and went to school at the Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena.

“I had to be at the hall in Wilmington at four [in the afternoon]. So I would work, pick up my job at 4, go to work, get off at 3 in the morning, get home, and hopefully make it sleep by 5 a.m., and sleep for a couple of hours, get up and be in Pasadena at 9 a.m. in the morning. Go to school,” Shalamar explained. “When I would get out of school there, I think I got out at 2 p.m., so I would get out at two and get right on the freeway and drive straight to the hall. And I would sleep in my car until they started dispatch. And my friends would come out to the car and get me. They’d be like, ‘Shalamar … Come on. Let’s get this job.’ And I would get my job and do it all over again.” 

Lane credits her family with teaching her the traditions, the recipes and life’s lessons. But they also showed her what it means to have grit. She opened the restaurant with her brother Marvin in 2015. But when COVID-19 hit in 2020, it nearly took them out. She managed to reconfigure the restaurant into take-out only and weathered the shutdowns and the resulting in labor issues brought on by COVID-19. 

Lane’s stature as a chef, pitmaster and restaurateur has been featured in LA Eater magazine, entered the 2022 Pitmasters vs. Locals BBQ competition in Fountain Valley and won the People’s Choice award and became a fellow with Kingsford Charcoal’s Preserve the Pit initiative for aspiring barbecue professionals interested in preserving Black barbecue culture and tradition.

We can’t wait to see what she does next.