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Barbecue New York

By Josh Ozersky

Barbecue is booming in New York these days. The perfume of the pits wafts from Woodbury woodpiles and West Village meeting places, from mobile pits in Rego Park and Staten Island to multimillion-dollar restaurants all over Manhattan.

Purists have debated whether any of it is truly authentic. But when Kansas City's legendary "Baron of Barbecue," Paul Kirk, opened a Manhattan restaurant earlier this year, no one could doubt that barbecue had truly arrived.

It was a long time coming.

Those who love barbecue as babies love milk can remember all too well what it was like just a few short years ago. "English Bob" Pearson, as he was sometimes called by his fans, was the only game in town, with restaurants in Long Island City and Jackson Heights, both now closed.

He set the standard for the genuine article - no dry rub, no glaze, sauce on the side - and continues the tradition at his new place, Pearson's Texas Barbecue, 170 E. 81st St. in Manhattan.

It wasn't, and isn't, the sticky-sweet, mushy dish soaked in a cloying sauce that is served in so many franchise restaurants. This was true barbecue, cooked for many hours in a transforming bath of hardwood smoke.

Classic pit smoking changes meat, rendering some of its fat and flavoring what remains, tenderizing the meat as it shrinks and giving the final result a pink ring meaningful to pitheads.

Today, a new barbecue restaurant seems to open every month, with the wildly successful Daisy May's BBQ U.S.A., Blue Smoke, Dinosaur BBQ and now Paul Kirk's R.U.B. (Righteous Urban Barbecue), all in Manhattan, being the most notable.

Smoking, or nonsmoking?

But few have adopted Pearson's no-frills aesthetic: most of the new barbecues are as ambitious about their sauces, marinades and spice rubs as they are about the smoking process itself.

"The way I look at it, barbecue doesn't just cook itself. It's a real craft," says Adam Perry Lang of Daisy May's BBQ U.S.A., a classically trained chef who was once a protégé of Daniel Boulud. Perry doesn't like an overly smoky barbecue and so uses wood fuel that has already burned down in his secret, self-designed smoker.

For others, like Pearson and John Stage of Dinosaur, the smoky taste is the essence of barbecue. Indeed, as soon as you walk into Dinosaur, the unmistakable smell of hickory smoke hits you like the remembered face of an old flame.

The smell is the first giveaway that barbecue, in the traditional Southern sense, is something different from what New Yorkers are used to. Says one of the area's best barbecuers, Rick Anselmi of Poppa Rick's Fine Foods in Woodbury, "If you're born here, you have no conception of what barbecue is.''

It's not backyard grilling

For Anselmi, the barbecue epiphany happened 10 years ago on a trip to Houston. "Being from Long Island, I thought barbecue meant grilling in the backyard," he says. "But when you get down there and consider what they consider barbecue, it's a revelation.

"This old man stood by a hinged oil drum for hours and hours and let me taste the brisket he was cooking. It was as tender as a pot roast, but it didn't have a boiled taste. This is a piece of brisket? It was a fascination to me, it really was."

Barbecue hits New York

For many New Yorkers, barbecue is something they've heard about but possibly never had. That is, many never had it until three events in the summer of 2003 helped the current barbecue explosion reach critical mass.

On June 2, Danny Meyer's Big Apple Block Party, sponsored by Blue Smoke, was the Woodstock of New York barbecue. It brought some of the country's most famous pitmasters from their homes in Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina and other trans-Hudson barbecue capitals. A couple of weeks later, on June 21, the first annual Grill Kings Long Island BBQ Cook-off was held in Eisenhower Park and Will Breakstone of Islip emerged the winner.

And on Aug. 16, on Ward's Island, Travis Mills and Robert Richter, two young local barbecue enthusiasts, threw BBQ-NYC, a cult event as memorable in its own way as Meyer's extravaganza.