By Jane and Michael Stern

updated 9:53 a.m. ET July 3, 2008

Is there any food that better conveys summer than barbecue? After all, no cuisine is more easygoing, begging to be eaten with a wipe-your-hands-on-your-shorts brio—and nothing tastes as good when the heat of July sweeps in. And while we're all for cooking in the backyard, a quest for America's best barbecue makes a heck of a good excuse to get out and explore our country's little towns and back-road byways. Compare those succulent spareribs from Leon's in Chicago with the whole-hog barbecue in North Carolina's Skylight Inn, while planning a trip to Memphis for barbecue spaghetti (you read that right). Here are our picks for some of the best, representing smoke-pit passions from coast to coast. It'll make you glad to be American.

1. Edisto Island, South Carolina
About an hour southwest of Charleston, Edisto Island seems barely connected to the mainland. Lying among a series of tangled waterways, it has no traffic lights, and beachside residents are required to turn off all outdoor lamps and to be quiet after dark so sea turtles can come ashore and lay their eggs in peace. The buffet line at Po Pigs Bo-B-Q (named for proprietor Robert Bobo Lee) is also proudly primitive, harking back to the old Carolina ritual of a pig pickin'—where everything is laid out, "from the beard to the tail" (barbe à queue). All of the meat is cut and pulled from slow-smoked hogs, and you'll find dark meat, light meat, pork cracklin's made from the skin, even pig innard hash to ladle over white rice. Decorate the pork with any of four different barbecue sauces—including a uniquely South Carolinian mustard sauce—and side it with a panoply of true-South vegetables such as turnip greens and squash casserole, plus hush puppies. True to classic pig pickin' hours, Po Pigs is open only on weekends.

Po Pigs Bo-B-Q
Tel: 843 869 9003

2. Casmalia, California
Unlike barbecue in the South and Southwest, where meat is cooked for hours in hardwood coals, barbecue in the Santa Barbara area is always done in the open, on a grate over flaming oak logs. It's a legacy of the Golden State's bygone culture of the Spanish cowboys, known as vaqueros, who used to reign over the bucolic ranchland northwest of Los Angeles. The most popular cut of beef here is the tri tip, which, although not as supple as filet mignon or as succulent as prime rib, delivers resounding flavor and robust character. The meat at Hitching Post seems to almost glow with the flavor of the fire, and there's also a piquant smack of a wine vinegar and oil marinade, which is applied as it cooks. "The trick is in how the steaks are handled," owner Bill Ostini says. "You've got to know how to cook which steak which way. It depends on the marbling, and how much age they have. It takes two to three years to train a cook to do it the right way." Who says cowboys are dead?

Hitching Post
Tel: 805 937 6151

3. Atlanta, Georgia
"Flames are bad; the glow is good," the pit man at Harold's once told us, explaining that classic Southern barbecue is never cooked over a fire but rather basks in smoke from smoldering wood coals. So it is at Harold's, which, despite its location in a sad neighborhood near a federal penitentiary, is Atlanta's most respected beacon of barbecue, with velvet-soft sliced pork, ribs painted with intensely seasoned translucent red sauce, and the vegetable-and-smoked-meat gallimaufry known as Brunswick stew. The stew comes as a meal unto itself or as a companion to ribs or pulled pork; its vegetal sweetness is quietly accentuated by a distant vinegar tang. It can only be improved by crumbling a square of Harold's corn bread on top.

Harold's
Tel: 404 627 9268

4. Hot Springs, Arkansas
Hot Springs attracts vacationers for its mineral waters and let's-have-a-beer-in-the-tub spirit. It's also host to one of the South's premier barbecue parlors, McClard's. The dish to get: a rib-and-fry plate. Don't worry when it arrives and all you see are french fries. Just below these ravishing dark-gold potato logs you'll discover a mountainous rack of meat-laden spareribs sauced with a dark red potion that the joint has been using since 1928, when McClard's was a trailer park and they secured the recipe from a customer in lieu of rent. (How Southern can you get?) The process of picking up a few fries every time you heft a rib is a skill regulars have perfected. Electrified with a rainbow of different peppers, and just sweet enough to make its heat all the more pleasurable, the sauce will gradually set your tongue on fire, making iced tea refills (or multiple beers) a happy necessity.

McClard's
Tel: 501 623 9665

5. Memphis, Tennessee
In this barbecue capital, where the pork is mellow and the sauce alarming, the number one barbecue restaurant is the Cozy Corner, a humble, family-run storefront that serves peppery spareribs with a huge sweet-pork punch. Not to mention baby backs with meat that slips from the bone in glistening ribbons, plus thick disks of barbecue bologna, and that delightfully monomaniacal Memphis side dish, barbecue spaghetti (noodles bathed in a kaleidoscopic barbecue sauce—ideal for a hangover). Cozy's unique house specialty is Cornish hen, a plump little bird that emerges from its long smoke bath with fragile, burnished skin wrapping meat that throbs with spicy flavor right down to its bones.

Cozy Corner
Tel: 901 527 9158

6. Chicago, Illinois
Some of the most soulful barbecue is found in the Midwest. Chicago's original Leon's has been around since 1941, and it still delivers brawny spareribs that drip juice as soon as you bite through the crust. Leon's also serves exemplary rib tips, a lower-cost option that, because of their small size, demand more tooth work—but are perhaps even more rewarding. The tips deliver meat that is tenderloin-tender, dizzyingly swirled with the potent flavors of hickory and oak smoke. Leon's is take-out only, and the meals come in cardboard boats, the entrée covered with a mess of french fries drenched with sauce, plus a couple of slices of clean, spongy white bread. You would not want this bread for any other meal, but as a sauce sop and salve between bouts with barbecue, it's the right stuff. And because it is awfully messy, we suggest you eat it outside of the car.

Leon's
Tel: 773 778 7878

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