At 2M Smokehouse in San Antonio, Esaul Ramos, and Joe Melig choreograph their bedtimes like tag-team wrestlers: one goes in, one comes out. It’s the only way to get any sleep when your barbecue workweek lasts 110 hours and there’s just two of you running the pit.

The bed’s convenient, at least. A mattress next to the mammoth smoker where briskets, pork ribs, and sausages slow-smoke their way to recasting San Antonio as a destination barbecue city. The mattress came from their landlord’s mattress store next door. It rests on a cot to keep it off the concrete floor of the screened-in smokehouse. And it cost them points on their health department scorecard.

No matter. The mattress stays. Because this is how overnight success happens, one all-nighter at a time.

Esaul Ramos Photo by Robert Jacob Lerma

But the overnights don’t matter if the barbecue can’t back it up in the light of day. It can. Witness the lines of people who have taken 2M Smokehouse from its 11 a.m. opening time to sold out in as little as an hour and 45 minutes since it opened in December.

They’re lining up for prime Angus brisket with a black cobblestone bark of salt and pepper over a velveteen interior, pork sausage spiked with serrano chiles and ribbons of dense white Oaxaca cheese. They come for pork ribs with a half-sweet finishing glaze and the right amount of tension on the bone, because “fall-off-the-bone” isn’t a compliment; it’s a description of overcooked ribs.