On a Saturday in November, Ed Mitchell stands in front of his new staff wearing frayed overalls, a flannel shirt and scuffed work boots. He's ready to let them in on a secret.

Many of the waiters and cooks are holdovers from Nana's Chophouse, the white-tablecloth restaurant that closed to make way for The Pit, Mitchell's comeback venture. Mitchell, a 61-year-old barbecue pitmaster with a bushy white beard, looks out of place against the dining room's gleaming glass and polished maple interior. But here's what his new staff needs to know: His clothes are a costume.

"This is a persona. This is an image. Back in the day, they wore bib overalls. This is what the pitmaster is," Mitchell says. "This is what got me national fame. This is how I ended up on the front page of The New York Times." Later in an interview, Mitchell explains: "I can't market the old-fashioned way of barbecue if I got a three-piece suit on."

It is Mitchell's knack for self-promotion, as much as his skill at cooking Eastern North Carolina barbecue, that has helped him survive the recent turmoil of his life. But then, Mitchell will tell you that his recent troubles were due in part to his need to chase the limelight.

In 2005, a bank foreclosed on Mitchell's nationally lauded restaurant in his hometown of Wilson. A year later, tax problems landed him in jail for a month. Mitchell filed extensive litigation against the bank, which was settled a few weeks ago. While he has the keys back, Mitchell says the Wilson building will never be a restaurant again. Instead, he's focused on his new venture.

About a year ago, Mitchell formed a partnership with downtown developer Greg Hatem, whose devotion to historic preservation has moved beyond buildings to barbecue. Mitchell is one of only a few African-American pitmasters cooking Eastern North Carolina barbecue, and he remains a national foodie icon. Together they opened The Pit in November.

Mitchell hopes the new partnership will lead to the success he dreamed of years ago: a chain of restaurants. This run at building a restaurant empire is different. His previous failure acquainted him with his limitations. He's leaving the front of the house and the books to Hatem and his Empire Eats company. Mitchell will tend to the kitchen and the marketing.

Cultivating his image is Mitchell's long suit. It has made him a media darling, more so than any of the other North Carolina barbecue stalwarts east of Interstate 95.

In the foodie kingdom

In June, as in every summer since 2003, Mitchell cooked at The Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York City. In September, producers of Gourmet magazine's "Diary of a Foodie" filmed a segment on Mitchell that will air on public television in April. (UNC-TV airs the show at 3 p.m. Saturdays.) In October, he returned for a third time to cook at the Southern Foodways Alliance's symposium, a gathering of food devotees and media tastemakers that has embraced Mitchell as a god of pork.

At the alliance's annual gathering at Ole Miss, you never know whom you might end up talking to over a glass of whiskey -- a New York Times food writer, a James Beard award-winning chef, a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, a country ham purveyor from Tennessee, or Roy Blount Jr. Most symposium veterans know Mitchell, either shaking his hand over the buffet line or sneaking a peek inside the tractor-trailer where he was cooking his hogs.

Standing behind a spread of pork in those well-worn overalls, Mitchell looks the part of the old-school pitmaster who has spent his life tending the coals. It surprises even some of his closest associates to learn that he spent about a dozen years wearing three-piece suits as a midlevel manager for Ford Motor Co. before taking up his current profession.

At 6 a.m. on an October Saturday in Oxford, Mitchell and his brother Aubrey are inside a 53-foot trailer that has Mitchell's smiling face painted on the outside. Two hogs, each weighing more than 170 pounds, wait to be cooked on a pair of grills. A couple of symposium attendees stand outside the trailer in the morning chill and watch Mitchell work.

For their benefit, Mitchell narrates as the hogs are butterflied. As Aubrey cuts sheets of fat from a hog's rib cage, Mitchell says, "Later on, we're going to heat that stuff. We're going to make soap. ... We're going to do that in the new restaurant." (An hour later, Aubrey dumps the scraps of fat in one of the nearby Dumpsters. Asked if the soap at The Pit will be made of rendered pig fat, Hatem said they are open to anything.)

After the pigs are ready, Mitchell uses a garden hose to fill two aluminum trays with water. He empties a bottle of his own Pitmaster brand barbecue sauce into the trays, followed by apple cider vinegar.

"This is a real trade secret I'm getting ready to show you," Mitchell says to the couple, his breath coming out in wisps.

Mitchell adds black pepper to the trays, and then places a log in each. "We're marinating the wood," he declares.

Eventually, Mitchell tells his small audience what he learned about barbecue from his father and grandfather. They taught him to soak the wood in a vinegar and pepper marinade, not to sit up all night with the pig, replenishing the coals. He learned to "set it and forget it," arranging the hog over banked hot coals and wood, not lifting the lid until the pig is done.

Mitchell's mom and dad owned a small grocery store on the east side of Wilson. After high school, Mitchell earned a sociology degree from Fayetteville State University, served in Vietnam and lived outside North Carolina, including some time in Boston.

In the mid-1980s, Mitchell returned to Wilson to help care for his ailing father. This time in his late 30s, by Mitchell's own admission, was marked by immaturity, a love of all-night poker games and a belief that he was "a special gift" to the ladies. His father disapproved of the gambling and urged Mitchell to start a business, often lecturing while his son drove him to Greenville for cancer treatments. "If you use your talents, you could be a multimillionaire," was his familiar refrain.

Two weeks after his father died, Mitchell again found himself at a poker table. But he couldn't win a hand. In his frustration, Mitchell's mind flashed to his father's words: Stop playing poker and use your talents. "That's the turning point of Ed Mitchell being redefined," he says.

Cooking up a new business

His father died in June 1990, and his mother, Doretha, returned to the grocery store. One day, Mitchell says, he stopped by to find her depressed by the slow pace of business. She had sold only $17 worth of groceries that day. Mitchell offered to make her lunch to cheer her up. She said, "I have a taste for some old-fashioned barbecue."

Mitchell says he cooked a 34-pound pig on a cooker outside the store. He chopped the hog and his mother seasoned the meat. While they were eating lunch, a customer came in and asked, "Oh, Mrs. Mitchell, you all selling barbecue, too?" She looked at her son. Mitchell nodded. When Mitchell returned that night to see his mom home, she had perked up. She had sold all the barbecue. Just as they were closing up for the night, another customer asked if they had any more. Mitchell says he told them: "We'll have some more tomorrow."

"That's how it happened," he says. "That is how it started." Within months, Mitchell says, he was making barbecue at the store full time, and eventually the grocery became Mitchell's Barbecue.

It's a great story. It's just that the details change slightly with each telling. In Bob Garner's book, "North Carolina Barbecue: Flavored by Time," Mitchell's mother sold only $12 worth of groceries and explicitly asked for old-fashioned barbecue and "not that gas-cooked stuff." Garner writes that Mitchell cooked the pig the next day and it was a couple of years before barbecue became Mitchell's full-time job.

In Mike Mills' "Peace, Love and Barbecue," Mitchell says he was working for the state Department of Labor in Raleigh at the time. Mitchell is quoted as saying, "Got to where I was driving home from Raleigh like a wild man, pulling my tie off as I was driving down the highway. Had to get home to put the pig on." Labor officials say Mitchell worked for the department for three months in late 1978 and not in the 1990s.

Despite the fuzzy details, the story gained attention for Mitchell after Garner, a UNC-TV reporter and producer, wrote a chapter about him in his 1996 book. It was the first bit of notice Mitchell garnered outside of Wilson, a town dominated by such barbecue institutions as Bill's and Parker's.

By 1999, Mitchell says, the business had outgrown the family store. Erader A. Mills Jr., a local developer, agreed to do a $1.4 million expansion of the restaurant. Mitchell agreed to pay Mills back with a collateralized loan on the new building. In 2002, the new restaurant opened with its "pig bar," automated pits, a drive-through window, a private party room and classrooms to train staff and, Mitchell hoped, to one day offer cooking classes.

That summer, Southern Foodways Alliance director John T. Edge invited Mitchell to cook at the group's annual symposium. "For the people at the symposium, his barbecue was a revelation," Edge says. By the weekend's end, The New Yorker writer and barbecue-obsessed keynote speaker Calvin Trillin was fawning over Mitchell's pork. New York Times reporter and gourmand R.W. Apple Jr. wrote a front-page story about the event featuring a photo of Mitchell.

An invitation followed to cook at the inaugural The Big Apple Barbecue Block Party. Television chef Anthony Bourdain stopped by the restaurant to eat chitterlings and souse meat for his Food Network show, "A Cook's Tour." Mitchell got a second invitation to cook in Oxford.

As Mitchell looks back on his first appearance at Oxford in 2002, he says of the Wilson restaurant, "The Southern Foodways Alliance was the beginning of the end of this building."

Money troubles begin

By 2004, Mitchell was struggling to make the loan payments to Southern Bank & Trust. In October 2004, the bank foreclosed on his restaurant. Mitchell and Erader Mills say bank officials mishandled the loan and the foreclosure. Their arguments persuaded a Superior Court judge, who stopped the foreclosure and wrote in his ruling that he cannot find that the bank "comes into court with clean hands."

Mills and Mitchell also filed a federal lawsuit claiming that bank officials racially discriminated against them and conspired with Wilson's white barbecue establishment and pork producers in Eastern North Carolina to put Mitchell out of business. Mitchell's theory for the conspiracy: He was starting to get national attention for his idea of cooking only heritage-breed pigs instead of confinement-bred hogs. "Who would have an interest in trying to derail something that went counter to what they represent?" Mitchell asks. "It's all about money."

The bank, through its lawyer, declined to comment about the litigation or the settlement. The owners of Parker's declined to comment. Bill Ellis of Bill's did not return messages seeking comment.

Mitchell's troubles didn't end there. In May 2005, he was accused of embezzling about $75,000 in state sales and withholding taxes. Mitchell had twice before been charged with misdemeanors for similar conduct and seen the charges dismissed when he paid the taxes. Mitchell says he was targeted and shouldn't have faced felonies.

Tom Dixon, head of the criminal investigation unit with the N.C. Department of Revenue, is unapologetic about the people who are charged with felonies: repeat offenders who typically owe more than $70,000 and work in high-profile professions. Dixon wants as much media coverage as possible to dissuade others from not paying their taxes. "That's just the nature of the beast," Dixon says.

Mitchell admits the national attention distracted him from his Wilson restaurant.

"It's obvious Ed's strength doesn't lie in the nuts and bolts of running a business," says Garner, the author and a longtime friend of Mitchell's. "He was sloppy. He was out trying to make a name for himself. He wasn't paying close enough attention to what was going on at home."

Mitchell paid the owed taxes and was sentenced to 30 days in jail, which he served on the weekends. He is on probation until 2009. Court records show Mitchell still has a pair of unpaid personal state income tax liens, of which Mitchell says he was unaware.

But Mitchell says his lawyer, Anthony Brannon, changed his life. Brannon, who represented Mitchell and Mills in the bank litigation, describes himself as a wannabe entrepreneur who practices law. In 2006, Brannon had Mitchell cook barbecue at his law firm's Christmas party in Raleigh and made sure Hatem was there to taste the pork and meet the cook. Less than a year later, The Pit opened.

Hatem, a native of Roanoke Rapids, grew up eating Eastern North Carolina barbecue, and had dined at Mitchell's restaurant.

While Hatem has made a name for himself as a developer devoted to preserving historic buildings, he also has a hand in the restaurant business. He owns The Raleigh Times and The Morning Times and has a stake in The Duck & Dumpling.

To Hatem, Mitchell's pit-cooked barbecue is a genuine piece of Eastern North Carolina culture worth preserving at a time when Raleigh is becoming more homogenized by national restaurant chains. Hatem believes if they stay true to the cooking method, people will wipe barbecue sauce from their mouths with cloth napkins instead of paper.

It's a gamble. Success depends on whether Raleigh is ready for a high-end barbecue restaurant selling a dinner plate of pork and two sides for $12 when the going rate for a similar order at Clyde Cooper's Barbecue, a few blocks away, is $5.50. Are 'cue eaters willing to pay more for the chance to drink wine and microbrews with their pork? And can this vinegary whole hog barbecue, one of a few barbecue styles that have not migrated far beyond their borders, attract enough fans beyond Eastern North Carolina to support expansion?

"The trick is getting people to understand that barbecue is down-home but also gourmet," Hatem says.

The two men, as business partners, realize their strengths. Hatem says about Mitchell, "He's a much better chef than a businessman. ... I can assure you that you don't want me cooking in the kitchen."

And Mitchell seems content to focus on the food -- and his image.

"I used to do it all," he said. "But I realized I can't do it all."