The most surprising example of braised ribs may well come from Extra Virgin in Kansas City, Mo. “I respect the local barbecue tradition so much, I would never want to compete with it,” said Michael Smith, the chef and an owner. Instead, he sears baby backs on the restaurant’s wood-burning grill for a few minutes to lay on a light smoke flavor before gently braising them in the oven for three to four hours in a Peruvian-inspired glaze made with guava marmalade, citrus juice, coffee beans and fiery aji amarillo chilies. “In this part of the world, people like their ribs sweet and sticky,” he said.

Until recently, barbecue connoisseurs in places like Kansas City would have considered ribs cooked in the oven little short of blasphemy. In barbecue country and elsewhere, the technique had a miserable reputation that, in truth, was often deserved. Some restaurants baked ribs with overly sweet commercial barbecue sauce. Others, to avoid drying them out, would cook ribs in boiling water. As with braising, the idea behind boiling ribs is to tenderize them before tossing them on the grill or under the broiler to caramelize and crisp the exterior.

The problem with boiling is that it’s a flavor-removing, not flavor-enhancing, cooking method. (When you make stock, you boil bones with the express purpose of transferring the flavor from the meat to the water.) By contrast, braising in the oven adds flavor, because you’re cooking the ribs in a small quantity of flavorful liquid in a sealed environment.

Many restaurants made matters worse when they slathered boiled or baked ribs with barbecue sauces pumped up with artificial smoke to compensate for lackluster flavor. The result? Ersatz barbecue and a lost generation of rib eaters, especially in traditionally non-barbecue regions like the Frost Belt and the Northeast, which came to confuse liquid-smoke-flavored oven-cooked ribs for true pit barbecue.

Image Sweet-sour balsamic-glazed pork ribs. Credit... Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

The chefs who are now rescuing oven ribs from their lowly reputation take a profoundly different approach. “We’re not trying to fake true barbecue,” said Mr. Shook of Animal. Instead, he and some of his colleagues around the country are deploying the braising technique, which he said builds layers of flavor utterly different from those that can be achieved in a smoker.