The sandwich itself was a $3.95 mess, heaped with chopped pork, showered with “hot” sauce more sweet than hot, and overflowing with yellowish-green, mustard-laced coleslaw. It may not have been the Platonic ideal of a Memphis barbecue sandwich, but if it was good enough for the guy grabbing a bite with his cement mixer parked outside, it was good enough for me.

Those spots have all achieved some level of fame, but the farther out I drove (and Memphis is one sprawled-out city), things got friendlier. The young woman behind the counter at Three Little Pigs, a shack in the parking lot of the Quince Station Shopping Center, a 20-minute drive southeast of town, was chatty and seemed interested in hearing why I was in town; an older man on his way back from his bowling league was open to chatting. The pork was just O.K., but I did appreciate their motto: “We Will Serve No Swine Before Its Time.” Even better were Tom’s Bar-B-Q and Deli (tomsbarbq.com) and Brad’s Bar-B-Q, the first near the airport and the second just across the border in Bartlett, Tenn.

At Tom’s, on a nondescript corner on State Route 176, I ordered the pork sandwich platter, which came with two sides and a drink for $8.49. But something told me I should also try the rib tips — perhaps it was the multiple oversize posters showing Guy Fieri posing with the owner and the rib tips. The rip tips were $8.99 a pound, so I asked the smallest amount I could order; a man behind the counter overheard me and said, “I’ll put some in there for you.”

And he did: four dry-rubbed, irregularly shaped, leathery, peppery, chewy pieces of rib tips. I gnawed my way through them and then realized I had no idea what rib tips are. So I went back to the kitchen to ask my benefactor. Turns out rib tips are the leftovers you get when separated off when you cut ribs St. Louis style. “They’re like jerky,” he told me. “I call them game food — something to nibble on when you’re watching the game.”

I had a similarly generous experience at Brad’s, which, though it was technically just across the border in Bartlett, Tenn., was still only about 20 minutes from downtown Memphis. They were not going for the sort of informality I found at Payne’s or Craig’s — there was table service and an effort at décor (a rifle, an old baseball mitt, a lantern on the rafters) — but clearly were not used to receiving out-of-town visitors.