They talk about Texas, and they talk about Memphis, and they talk about Kansas City. But none of those places matter. Barbecue is a country five feet wide and twenty feet long, and it's filled with darkness, smoke, and meat. The place that surrounds that sacred space might be technically Texas, or Alabama, or North Carolina. It doesn't really matter; all that matters is the meat.

I was in Columbus Ohio, on a research mission for the American Food and Drink Awards, when I stumbled across Ray Ray's Hog Pit. Ray Ray's isn't even a restaurant—it's a truck in a random parking lot in a city considered dull even by some Ohioans. You wouldn't know it was there unless you were parking next to it, or if somebody told you. But somebody is telling you, and that somebody is me. Ray Ray's pit is a home-welded black barbecue bomb; all it lacks is a funny name and a Vargas girl drawn on its side. It's scarred and sticky, and the jet-black creosote coating it an abyssal plane of dark matter absorbing light and reflecting back only flavor.

Ray Ray is actually a man named Jamie Anderson, and he uses black hickory and white oak to power his cooker. Most days he has brisket in there, and pork butts, and baby back ribs, and jerk chicken, and spare ribs. The brisket is especially beloved by locals, and it is good, but transcendently good brisket comes along about as often as amicable divorces. In most cases the best you get is some smoke, some texture, and the sauce bearing the rest of the load. That's true at Ray Ray's to some extent, but that's fine—pork is the name of the game at Ray Ray's—his pork is coarse and irregular, slathered in smoky orange pork fat and mixed with dark smoky crust. Even the pulled pork is relatively coarse—"it's not chopped up so fine that it's like cat food," Anderson told me, using my own favorite simile. His baby back ribs are deep pink half way down, which is hard to do without drying them out. (Being pork loin, they start out dry, after all.) I'd also like to say a word here for Ray Ray's macaroni and cheese, which is deep and stiff with real cheese, instead of the usual phosphorescent off-brand Velveeta you see so often. And his collards are wonderful too, soft but not slick, porky while still looking like actual leaves.

But the spare ribs are the things that haunt me.

I don't know if I ever ate better spare ribs in my years in thrall to barbecue addiction. Even when I was supporting a $300-a-month rib habit, it was rare that I found one that was served at that perfect steak-like temperature, that yielded easily to teeth without just giving it all up like a rattled snitch under questioning, that blended the taste of pork and wood so intimately that you couldn't tell where one pickued up and the other left off. Also, these ribs are juicy. Soup-dumpling juicy. You could dress wounds with their fat. I could go on and on about these ribs, but I won't; I can't really do justice to them, or to the man himself. But I hope Eat Like a Man readers will take heart from the fact that the best ribs I can remember eating were made in a stick-burning oil-drum style smoker, in a city that barely knows what barbecue is.

Josh Ozersky

Josh Ozersky Josh Ozersky was Esquire's Food Correspondent and a regular contributor to Esquire.com.

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