who barbecues best?

Four great American locales agree that three of them don’t quite reach perfection. But who’s got it just right? Only you can decide.

Texas

Everything is bigger in the Lone Star State, including barbecue. Here barbecue means beef, and beef means brisket. The largest cuts cook all night long, bathing in the warm smoke of a hickory and post oak fire. Pitmasters season with salt and coarsely ground pepper—nothing more, nothing less. Sometimes they’ll throw on a few links of sausage and a rack of beef ribs the size of dinosaur bones. Then they’ll hit the hay, waking up every so often to make sure the fire burns low and slow. Everybody knows the ’cue won’t be ready until the following day, when the brisket’s dark, crackly bark gives way to meat as soft as pudding. In the Texas Hill Country, BBQ is served on butcher paper and accompanied by slices of white bread, but rarely any sauce. “No real Texan asks for sauce,” says one pitmaster. “That’s like requesting more wine at communion.”

Memphis

This is ground zero for pork, wet-mopped or dry-rubbed— the entire city celebrates the hog. Pitmasters slowly smoke pork ribs and shoulders over hickory and oak, then serve the meat showered with a heavy hand of spice rub or slathered with a sweet, tangy, tomatobased sauce—or sometimes both. You’d be hard-pressed to find better pork ribs than the ones they turn out in Memphis. Some locals mix their smoked pork into pasta sauce. Others will toss a log of bologna into the smoker and call that barbecue too. No one, though, disputes the legitimacy of a pulled pork sandwich. The mixture of smoked pork shoulder, creamy coleslaw and a glug of good sauce, all tucked inside a pillow-soft white bun, can make anyone a believer.

Kansas City

This town has never met a meat it didn’t like. Beef, pork, mutton, turkey, chicken— they’re all welcome. Here, sauce rules all. Though every pitmaster has his or her own secret sauce, the building blocks are the same: tomato, molasses, salt and a mix of fragrant spices. Those bottles of sweet, mahogany-red barbecue sauce sold in your grocery store? They’re all odes to Kansas City. This burg is crazy for pork ribs lightly glazed with sauce. The true barbecue aficionados, though, know to order a plate of “burnt ends,” the cooked brisket tips dipped in sauce, returned to the smoker and transformed into a barbecue trinity of smoke, sauce and meat.

Carolinas

There’s an ongoing, low-key barbecue battle going on in this region. In central South Carolina, sauces skew toward the sweet-and-sour tang of yellow mustard and vinegar. Everywhere else in these two fabled states, thin sauces constructed of tomatoes and vinegar predominate. One thing everybody agrees on, though, is that Carolina barbecue is all about pork. In some towns, the whole hog takes center stage; in others it’s chopped pork shoulder that receives top billing. Whether you prefer your ’cue served solo, mixed with crispy pork skin cracklings or tossed with cabbage as “barbecue slaw,” all of it warrants a journey to the Carolinas.