Bryan Furman is not wearing heatproof gloves. He holds no towel, no tongs. He’s reaching into an enormous barrel-shaped smoker verging on 300 degrees with bare hands. One by one he pokes each glistening pork rib, each halved chicken, each slab of salt-and-pepper-rubbed brisket.

“My finger can always tell,” he says. “If it doesn’t sink in, it’s not ready.”

Here at B’s Cracklin’ BBQ on Atlanta’s west side, Furman cooks meat the old-fashioned way: over split logs of oak and pecan wood burning hot above layers of coals. It’s a breezeless afternoon and the smokehouse is filled with a thick fragrant haze that leaves me sweating in a way some might describe as profuse. But Furman seems unfazed by the heat. Years as a welder have left his hands calloused, nearly immune to burns. He’s tall and lean and serene in a perspiration-free T-shirt bearing the name of his favorite local brewery, Creature Comforts, with tight, waist-length locks swept neatly under a backwards Run the Jewels flat-brim. It’s the same hat he was wearing the day he met André 3000 at a Whole Foods in Buckhead, waiting in line for the hot bar. “We was supposed to run into each other,” the notoriously elusive rapper told him. “This was supposed to happen.” Furman’s that kind of guy: the kind even hip-hop legends feel cosmically destined to meet, the kind who radiates cool even inside a stifling smokehouse on a swampy Atlanta afternoon.

With a pair of silver tongs now, Furman grabs a rack of ribs off the smoker and carries it into the restaurant’s narrow kitchen. This one is ready. Tossing it onto a white plastic cutting board, he slices each bone free, clean and quick. Drizzles a bit of his glossy orange sauce on one and chomps down. Gives a little head-shaking laugh of pleasure. “Here you go, I wouldn’t do you like that,” he says, passing me a rib of my own.

It’s so good—crackly exterior yielding to juicy butter-soft flesh—I take one bite and drop it on the floor. Goddammit. I’m staring down in horror, debating the professionalism of picking the thing up and eating it anyway, when Furman laughs and hands me another. “If you weren’t here,” he says, “I probably would’ve picked it up and ate it anyway.”

“Yeah, That Happened.”

Though he’s been a restaurant owner and full-time pitmaster for just four years, Furman, 37, already sits among the greats. Maybe it’s because he swaps out typical commodity pork for whole heritage-breed hogs he raised himself. (“Nobody else was doing that,” Furman says, “Not in a barbecue restaurant.”) Maybe it’s his unique Carolina-meets-Georgia style sauce, a sweet and tangy blend of mustard and fresh peaches. (“He does everything different,” says Nikki Furman, his wife and business partner.)