The Best Steak Sauce You've Never Heard Of: The Rattlesnake-Milking Pitmaster Who Made It
How a South Carolina veteran, a vinegar-based recipe, and a roadside barbecue legend on Florida's US 1 gave birth to one of America's most remarkable and long-lost sauces.
If you've been reaching for the same steak sauce your whole life, it's time to meet Mac Gilliam.
McLaurin "Mac" Gilliam wasn't a marketer. He wasn't a celebrity chef. He was a World War II veteran from Blackville, South Carolina who landed on US 1 in Ormond Beach, Florida in 1953, built a barbecue restaurant from scratch, and made a sauce so good that decades after his passing, his family brought it back exactly as he made it. Not because they thought they could improve on it, but because they knew they couldn't.
This is the story of Gill's BBQ Original Bar-B-Que & Steak Sauce. And it starts, as all the best stories do, with a man who did everything his own way.
From Cotton Country to the South Pacific to US 1
Mac Gilliam grew up in Barnwell County, South Carolina, the kind of place where barbecue isn't a weekend hobby, it's a cultural position. In South Carolina, barbecue means vinegar. It means the acid cuts through the smoke rather than sweetening it. It means the meat speaks for itself.
Mac carried that conviction with him when he enlisted in the Navy and served as an aviation chief machinist in the South Pacific during World War II. He carried it when he came back stateside, made his way to Florida, and in 1953 opened Gill's Bar-B-Que at 782 S. Yonge Street, a modest building on US 1 between Holly Hill and Ormond Beach that would become, over the next two decades, one of the most talked-about roadside restaurants in Florida.
The Sauce That Defied the Region
Walk into any barbecue joint in Florida in the 1950s and 1960s and you'd find the same thing: sweet sauce. Tomato-heavy, sugar-forward, the kind of sauce that coats everything in a thick, sticky layer and calls it flavor.
Mac went the other direction entirely.
His sauce was vinegar-based, South Carolina through and through. Sour, tangy, and engineered to enhance the natural flavor of the meat rather than overwhelm it. Where other pitmasters were adding sugar, Mac was adding restraint.
The cooking method was just as unconventional. Most barbecue pits ran logs directly beneath the grill and let the smoke travel straight up the chimney. Mac placed his logs to the side and used a fan to blow the smoke underneath and over the grill before it exited on the other side. Six hours over oak, not hickory, which was scarce in Florida. His method. His call. The result was a depth of smoke flavor that drew customers from across the state.
"We barbecue the way most South Carolinians do because my dad's one," his son Briggs explained in a 1975 interview. "Our sauce is sour based, using vinegar, while most people barbecue with a sweet, sugar based sauce. We've found the vinegar base brings out the flavor."
That quote is from 50 years ago. The recipe hasn't changed.
The Man Behind the Sauce
Here is where Mac Gilliam becomes genuinely unforgettable.
At 6:30 every morning, Mac built the barbecue fires. By 9am, he slipped across the four-lane highway to his other operation: Mack Gilliam's Rattlesnake Arena.
Mac milked diamondbacks, cottonmouths, coral snakes, and other venomous species by hand, extracting venom he sold to medical and chemical research laboratories for the production of anti-venom. His peers in this particular field were Bill Haast, director of the famous Miami Serpentarium, and Ross Allen, the noted snake expert at Silver Springs. Mac was considered among the foremost snake authorities in Florida.
On the same property, he raised 400 quail and 100 roosters, turning their eggs three times a day by hand in incubators set to 100-102 degrees. He pickled the extras in vinegar, beet juice, and spices. He helped area Boy Scouts earn their reptile merit badges, supplying snakes for the required 30-day care period and grading their reports himself.
This is the man who made your steak sauce.
The detail matters, not as novelty, but as character evidence. A man who handles rattlesnakes before breakfast and raises quail by hand does not cut corners on a sauce recipe. The same specificity, the same refusal to do anything halfway, the same patient obsession: it's all there in the bottle.
A Restaurant Unlike Any Other
Gill's Bar-B-Que wasn't just about the food, though the food was extraordinary. The Gainesville Sun called Mac's smoked turkey one of the finest they'd ever tasted. The Ormond Beach Journal compared the restaurant to Sardi's in New York, a place where you could "dine with presidents, politicians, celebrities and collectors."
What made Gill's unforgettable was Mac's conviction that a meal should leave you knowing something.
The walls were lined with more than 500 license plates from every US state, plus Germany, Denmark, Brazil, England, Canada, and China. The oldest was a 1906 paper plate from Michigan. Original newspaper front pages covered the rest of the wall space: Lincoln's assassination, Kennedy's assassination, Lindbergh landing in Paris, Truman holding up the famous Chicago Tribune, the end of the Pacific War. One cook remembered a newspaper page that dated back to the 1700s, among the collection's most prized pieces.
One journalist summarized it perfectly in 1975: "A meal can be an education."
Mac built a restaurant where history was the atmosphere, smoke was the greeting, and the sauce was the reason you came back.
The Fire, the Rebuild, and What the Family Kept
On May 25, 1975, fire destroyed Gill's Bar-B-Que.
The building had been closed for a week of remodeling. The work had just been completed. The restaurant was scheduled to reopen the following day when smoke began rolling out the back windows. By the time the Halifax Fire Department extinguished the blaze, the kitchen was gone, the front dining room was charred beyond recognition, and decades of irreplaceable artifacts, including a newspaper page believed to date to the 1700s, hundreds of license plates, and antiques from South Carolina, were ash.
What happened next tells you everything about the Gilliam family.
They rebuilt. Briggs Gilliam and his wife spent seven months sanding and cleaning more than 1,000 scorched license plates. They wrote to every state in America requesting the original paint colors for each year represented, then repainted every raised character by hand using a fingerprinting ink roller. They tracked down replacement newspapers, hunting for originals, not copies. They rebuilt the collection plate by plate, headline by headline.
The Gainesville Sun visited the rebuilt Gill's in 1977 and noted: "The work that must have gone into rebuilding the collection of newspaper front pages and repainting the license plates sounds awesome, but the end result justifies it."
You don't do that for a gimmick. You do it because it matters.
Mac Gilliam passed away in August 1976 at Halifax Hospital, at the age of 60, after a lengthy illness. He had been a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Elks, and the Optimist Club. He was member No. 332 of the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association, one of the organization's earliest members.
He left behind his wife Hazel, his son Briggs, his daughter Jonelle, and at that time 11 grandchildren. Jonelle passed in 2013. Briggs, who rebuilt the restaurant after the fire and kept the family Sauce legacy alive for decades, passed in 2023. The recipe, and the mission to bring it back, now rests with the next generation.
He also left behind the recipe.
Why the Sauce Is Different and Why It's Back
Most steak sauces on the market today share the same basic profile: sweet, thick, heavy on tomato and high-fructose corn syrup, with artificial smoke flavoring to approximate something they never actually put on a fire.
Gill's Original Bar-B-Que & Steak Sauce was built on the opposite philosophy. Vinegar-forward. Clean. Made to enhance the natural flavor of the meat, not compete with it. No artificial smoke. No excessive sugar. No fillers or thickeners. The kind of sauce that makes a good steak taste more like itself.
The family has returned to the original recipe, sourcing ingredients as close as possible to what Mac used when he first developed it. Each batch is made in small quantities, by hand. Because that's how Mac did it, and that's the only way to do it right.
Mac wouldn't have stood for shortcuts. Neither will his family.
Where to Get It
Gill's BBQ Original Bar-B-Que & Steak Sauce is available here online with free shipping on all orders over $35.
That being said, If you are lucky rnough to find yourself on I-40 near Hartford, Tennessee, Mac's grandson McLaurin Briggs Gilliam III, known as Briggs, carries on the tradition at Gill's Barbecue near Big Creek Expeditions. Hickory smoked, original recipe, all the fixins.
The sauce is back. Made exactly as Mac made it. Because some things are too good to stay lost.
Gill's Bar-B-Que was established in Ormond Beach, Florida in 1952. The original sauce recipe has remained unchanged since Mac Gilliam first developed it. Gill's BBQ Original Bar-B-Que & Steak Sauce is produced in small batches using the original family recipe.