I have a mac and cheese for you, which is something I don’t get to write very often.

Confession time: My heart sinks when my dining companions want to order the mac and cheese when I’m working. It’s generally disappointing stuff: sludgy, or gluey, or bland, or interspersed with inappropriate ingredients like truffle oil or pork belly or whatnot. Seriously, putting lobster in mac and cheese does no favors to the either the lobster or the noodles.

But I digress. The exception that proves my mac-and-cheese rule resides at the gleaming new incarnation of Ray’s BBQ Shack, a wonderful Third Ward institution on Old Spanish Trail, between the University of Houston and the Medical Center. Pitmaster Ray Busch and his partners — Maxine Davis and her son, former NFL football player Herb Taylor — have come up with a mac-and-cheese formula so sumptuous it’s a little scary.

The secret? The mac and cheese is finished off inside the pit, so that it emerges imbued with woodsmoke flavor curling around the neutral pasta bounciness and the milky, salt pop of cheese. The binding cheese sauce has just the right texture, not too thick and not too thin, and a big, pully crown of cheddar finishes the whole thing off.

It is, not to put too fine a point on it, sublime.

More Information Ray’s Real Pit BBQ Shack Where: 3929 Old Spanish Trail Phone: 713-748-4227 Hours: Open 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Saturday Website:raysbbqshack.com

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You might want to eat it with some homestyle green beans and Ray’s excellent fried catfish, sitting at the high, pewtery stools lining the restaurant’s sleek galvanized-tin counter. Maybe have a local beer on tap.

Or maybe have the mac and cheese alongside one of Ray’s excellent sandwiches, housed in buttery, toasted buns. There’s a lovely, clear smoke flavor to the brisket, as well as to the house-ground beef sausage and the meaty little rib tips that are old-timey classics of Third Ward barbecuing tradition.

You can get all three piled up on the Whole Barn sandwich for $10.95. I say go for it.

The new place is a great leap upwards from Ray’s original modest gas-station digs just a mile down O.S.T. It couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people, or to a nicer version of mac and cheese.

Alison Cook is the Chronicle's James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic. Follow her on Twitter, and keep up with Houston's latest dining and drinking news and reviews by subscribing to our free Flavor newsletter.