restaurantRestaurant Stakeout · Season 3, Episode 1 · Aired March 13, 2013
Hot Rods BBQ
Wharton, New Jersey
Open. The rescue stuck and it continues to operate.
What happened after
Active OpenTable listing (Award Winning American BBQ restaurant, Daily Record Readers Choice "Best BBQ" 2005-2015).
What happened on the show
The Wharton stakeout put Degel in the middle of a barbecue joint run with plenty of attitude, where owners Anthony and Toby needed a stakeout to see what their own swagger was costing them. The hidden cameras captured the floor unobserved, and as aired the footage let Degel confront the pair with a documented picture of their operation from the outside. His fixes ran along the show's familiar lines, tightening systems, sharpening service, and pushing clearer leadership onto a room that had been running on personality more than process. The episode leaned on the format's core logic, using the cameras to close the distance between how the owners thought their barbecue joint ran and how it actually did once no one behind the counter knew the boss was watching.
After the cameras left
Hot Rods BBQ is open. An active OpenTable listing describes it as an award winning American barbecue restaurant, noting a long run of local readers choice recognition, at the North Main Street address in Wharton. The signal came through a directory listing rather than a direct fetch of the restaurant's own site, so we hold it at moderate confidence, but it points clearly to an operating business. A New Jersey survivor among the show's stops.
Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.
What is there now
Street imagery via Google Maps. Location approximate.