When Guy Fieri puts his “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” spotlight on Mobile’s Meat Boss on Friday, he won’t just be sampling treats like “rib candy” and the deliciously smoky Boss Burger. One way or another, it’ll be a tribute.

Meat Boss started small in 2012. Benny Chinnis had a background in steel work and home construction, but he’d also built smokers and he enjoyed large-scale cooking. When he decided to turn professional, he opened what his wife, Dara Chinnis, has described as “an indoor food truck.” The smoker was outside. Inside was a prep area, a counter and no seating. It was takeout-only, lunch-only hole in the wall.

Chinnis lived up to the joint’s name with hard work. Dara Chinnis said he was obsessive about doing barbecue right.

“He babied these meats,” she once told AL.com. “We have a night crew now. But for many years, Benny would go up there every two hours and check the meats. Every night, every two hours.”

The business grew, adding dining rooms, sprawling across multiple sections of the commercial building it occupied. Thanks to some high-tech thermometers, he could check temperatures any time he wanted from home, while the night crew tended the smoker.

When the COVID-19 pandemic came along, Meat Boss’ roots in that “indoor food truck” mindset helped the business pivot back to a takeout-oriented model. Catering work disappeared for a while, and that had to be built back up. The restaurant’s business trade faded and eventually was dropped, meaning the loss of options such as the “Hog in a Blanket” – ham, Conecuh sausage, patty sausage and bacon folded up on a large pancake.

Meat Boss had been a family business from the start, with Dara Chinnis handling a lot of outside-the-kitchen business as “Mrs. Boss.” It took a few years to persuade her, but daughter Leah Lott, a bona-fide culinary-school-trained chef who’d been operating her own food truck, came on board.

There was an obstacle bigger than COVID to come. Chinnis battled cancer in the last months of his life, passing in October 2022. His obituary said that he had “considered the restaurant more of a ministry than a business. He never hesitated to provide for those in need … He invested in people and loved them deeply.”

Lott and Dara Chinnis carried on. And Chinnis said that’s one thing she hopes the “DDD” segment gets across loud and clear.

When she got word that Meat Boss might be considered for a segment on the show, she said, she knew it was something her late husband would have loved.

“I don’t know if it was an email or a call first,” she said. “But when we first heard about it, my first thought was, we had talked about that over the years and Benny always said that was the one show that he would love to do.”

For the record Dara Chinnis is herself a Guy Fieri fan from way back.

“The funny thing about this is … when Guy first got started and he was on a cooking competition many years ago, I voted for him,” she said. (That likely was “The Next Food Network Star,” which Fieri won in 2006, earning a shot at having his own show. Needless to say, he ran with the opportunity.)

“We laughed about that,” she said. “I mean, he was larger than life. He was just a great personality and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, he is, he is going to go far.’”

She and her husband liked to watch cooking shows, so they were well aware as Fieri’s empire grew. The notion of being featured on a show such as “DDD” was an obvious one.

“We never pursued anything,” she said. “So we never knew if that was going to come down the road for us. … My first thought was he [Benny Chinnis] would just be so excited, he would be excited to know that we were going to have the experience, but he would also be excited to know that America is going to see kind of the new Meat Boss, you know, the legacy.”

By the new Meat Boss, she means her daughter.

“They worked together for maybe five years before he passed away,” she said. “So she knows how he did everything, how he did the meat because that’s not necessarily something they teach in culinary school. But she can do anything she puts her mind to. She learned all that from him and she handles it.”

Lott doesn’t come to the shop every night like her dad did in the early days, Chinnis said, but she can monitor temperatures remotely just like he did later on.

“Some nights she comes up here, you know,” said Chinnis. The Meat Boss smoker, constructed by Benny Chinnis, is completely wood-fired, she said. “So it’s all hands on. Sometimes if it doesn’t act the way it’s supposed to, she comes up here and, you know, talks to it. She takes care of it and watches it now.”

Dara Chinnis wasn’t at liberty to give away spoilers of what went down during Fieri’s visit. And since she hadn’t seen a preview, she couldn’t be sure how much time the segment might spend on her late husband’s story. (Still, it seems promising that Meat Boss will be featured in the first episode of a new season, and that only two restaurants will be covered rather than the usual three.)

“I would love for a couple of things to see come from the show,” she said. “I would like people to remember Benny. And I would like for people to know that we are moving forward to continue his legacy. That’s the two biggest things that I hope to come out of it when the show airs.”

“I hope they edit it and make sure that it’s he’s honored,” she said. “But also that … You know, we get asked all the time. People come in still, after a year, they’ll say ‘I’m so sorry to hear about him. Are y’all gonna close? People still question that and I feel like the show’s gonna maybe answer that.”

Signs are, it’ll be an emphatic answer. The episode, titled “Smokin’ Southern Decadence,” promises a look at “a bomb Boss Burger with a side of rib candy and a stellar smoked brisket sandwich.”

Meat Boss is the sixth of six segments produced when Fieri visited the Mobile area last June. The other featured restaurants are The Noble South, Southwood Kitchen in Daphne, The Hummingbird Way, Roosters and Front Yard Tacos.

The new episode airs at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. Central time on the Food Network on Friday, March 1. Repeats are scheduled for 10 p.m. Saturday, March 9, and 5:30 p.m. Friday, April 5.