America’s best barbecue restaurants

By Matt Lee and Ted Lee

updated 4:39 p.m. ET Aug. 23, 2009

Beyond the shamrock gas station’s pumps and past the racks of Hostess cakes, a warren of tables and booths makes up the Kansas City, Kan., barbecue joint Oklahoma Joe’s. On a steamy Wednesday in July, the dean of Kansas City barbecue, Ardie Davis, sat alone in the restaurant beneath drowsy ceiling fans, looking at his watch. When he spied us, Davis shot up from his seat, and though it was just after 11 a.m., dashed toward the cashier to place his order: sliced beef brisket, pork ribs, French fries, beans and burnt ends.

The woman behind the counter looked up from her register. “Burnt ends ain’t ready yet,” she said. “Y’all gone stick around?”

“Wonderful,” Davis replied, and explained: you won’t find these caramelized morsels from the edges of the brisket, where the seasoning gathers as the fat renders, on the menu, they’re only served on Wednesdays and Saturdays; in a half-hour’s time, the lunch line would extend out the door, and then ... who knows when they might run out?

Davis wasn’t taking any chances. An avuncular retiree with a sturdy build and snowy hair, he’s the author of five books about barbecue and has been a competition-barbecue judge for 25 years.

Oklahoma Joe’s began life on that circuit in the early 90s as the Slaughterhouse Five, a team of barbecue enthusiasts who got together to cook at weekend championships around the Midwest and the South. The team won so many awards that by 1996, they opened a restaurant.

Compared with Kansas City institutions like the circa-1920 Arthur Bryant’s, O.J.’s was a modern place, using state-of-the-art smokers that cook meat with a combination of natural gas and wood.

When our food arrived, Davis took a bite of the rib, which pleased him immensely. “See this bark here?” he said, pointing to a reddish-black shard of crust on the surface of the rib. “You want it crispy like that on the outside, but tender on the inside. And there,” he said, pointing to a layer of almost lurid pinkness just beneath the skin that extended the length of the rib, “that’s the smoke ring, the sign that it’s been properly smoked.

O.J.’s uses more wood than gas. You go to some places and you can’t taste any smoke at all.” The ribs were, indeed, redolent of white oak and porky, and they disappeared quickly. The brisket was fall-apart tender, a tad dry but then there were sauces to dress it with (permissible in Kansas City).

Finally, the burnt ends came, and they were wonderful: salty, glistening with smoke-tinged fat, and prickly with the heat of black pepper. To us, they seemed to be the best bit, but Davis was having none of it. “They’re too salty, and there’s no bark on ’em,” he said, but conceded, “Concerning taste, there’s no argument. That’s what makes barbecue fun.”

Barbecue: A brief (25 millennia) history
What is it about barbecue? Historians tell us that for 250,000 years, man has applied low, slow heat to proteins to make them meltingly tender and delicious.

Christopher Columbus discovered the Taino people of modern-day Haiti cooking fish and meats on a grate of sticks lashed together and suspended above a fire, and dousing their food with a scorching chili sauce.

Portuguese and Spanish explorers in the New World found American Indians practicing a similar culinary art, and as waves of European settlers and enslaved Africans landed in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries, they adapted the technique to the food traditions they brought from their homelands and the raw materials of their new environment.

Germans who settled in the Hill Country of Texas smoked fat pork sausages over mesquite or oak of the region.

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In Kansas City, a cow town at the crossroads of several important early trade routes, the abundance of pecan and hickory meant that deeply smoky beef brisket and ribs came to define the city’s style. Barbecue emerged as something more than heating and seasoning protein — it became culture.

Every morsel of barbecue tells a story, starting with the meat: if it’s sausage, you’re in or around Austin, Texas. Mutton? Owensboro, Ky. Whole hog might be eastern North Carolina, western Tennessee or upstate South Carolina, depending on which hardwoods you’re using and how you seasoned your pork.

Did the pit master put a dry rub of black pepper and salt on it before laying it over the coals? Did he baste it once it was on the heat, and if so, with what kind of liquid? Did he turn the pig before it was done, and did he dress it with sauce before it was served?

Every decision a contemporary pit master makes might be rooted in tradition, in the choices our ancestors made; and even today these regional differences hold up.

We’d set out on a 3,000-mile odyssey, exploring the contours of American barbecue the way hikers thrill to the changing topography of the Appalachian Trail. We were in search of the ultimate barbecue, of course, but more than that, we were on a quest to determine what perfect barbecue might mean in 2009.

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We had notions of the quintessential barbecue joint: family-run (with a few generations on site, preferably), with an authentically acquired patina of age. We were fairly sure the barbecue of our dreams would come from a dwelling with a certain undersung-ness about it (and likely not a place with a punning or deliberately alliterative name, like Swineomite or Peter’s Piggy Palace).

But for the sake of our journey, we set out with open minds, hungry mouths, and — did we mention? — a 1972 Buick Limited. We’d seen the ad for the gold-colored, black-vinyl-topped Limited online about a month before our departure. It only had 90,000 miles on the clock, and we watched as the asking price dropped, then dropped again as our departure date approached. About a week before we left, we sent a check for the car, sight unseen, to a guy named Mick, in Stillwell, a suburb of Kansas City.

Why a 36-year-old, 6,000-pound car, when gasoline prices were running at an all-time high? Because our quest defied common sense, and we needed a vehicle to match.

The Buick had compelling features beyond its 455 V-8 engine and black brocade interior. Namely, four cigarette lighters — critical because we were packing our phones, one laptop for note-taking, another for downloading photos, and a small A/C car refrigerator (we’d be ordering a lot of barbecue, tasting lightly, and would want to keep samples for comparison). But more than all that, piloting the old American workhorse, demanding vast quantities of vigilance, time, and fuel, seemed to project a oneness with the ’cue.

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