Most of America says “let’s barbecue this weekend” and means burgers and hot dogs on a propane grill. No judgment - I love a grilled burger as much as anyone (In-N-Out is still the best, and I will not be taking questions). But that’s grilling. Barbecue is something else entirely - the slow business of getting smoke into meat at 200 to 225 degrees for six, eight, ten hours. It’s a living, breathing thing. You check on it every hour. You can’t rush it, and you can’t fake it. Which is probably why it didn’t only stay a food I loved — it turned into a passion.
Here’s how it started. For years I talked about going to the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party - the great pitmasters of America hauling their pits to Madison Square Park every June - and for years I had an excuse. New company, new marriage, new kids. I’d even owned Mike Mills and his daughter Amy’s book, Peace, Love, and Barbecue - half history, half recipes - for ages. Then one day my wife met me at the door and said: we’re going in two weeks. I bought the tickets. I already talked to your office. That was that.
We tried four or five pitmasters’ stands and saved 17th Street Barbecue - Mike Mills’s place from Murphysboro, Illinois - for last. I remember our group going silent. Nobody talking. Everybody eating. The next day I went back to buy two whole racks of ribs so my kids could taste it too, and the guy slicing ribs - David Bogen, I still remember his name - wouldn’t allow me to wait in line and wouldn’t take my tip. “I’m a corporate attorney,” he said. “I don’t need the tip.” Most people would ask why a corporate attorney spends his weekend slicing ribs in the heat. What I asked myself was: if he can do this, why can’t I?
So I found Amy on Twitter and asked to volunteer. She told me she gets a thousand of those requests a year - not joking - and she’d have to meet me in person first, “to make sure you’re not a psycho.” Fair. We had coffee. I passed. The next June I showed up at 7 a.m. on a Saturday - the “finance guy” among pitmasters - and made it clear I was there to learn, and if that meant cleaning a pit or wiping something down, that’s what I’d do. Around hour six they believed me, and the teaching started. At one point Mike came over: “Randy, let’s get up. We’re going to check on the ribs.” I told him that after half a day I was in no position to be judging ribs for him. He said, “That’s exactly why you’re coming with me. I’m going to teach you.”
I got a two-hour lesson from the man a lot of people consider the best ever. Mike Mills won the world barbecue championship four times, and the Grand World Championship - first place in every category, all at once - three times, which nobody else has done more than once. He passed away a few years ago, and while I miss him, I’m beyond thankful I got to know him. That night my wife made me strip in the hallway - every thread on me smelled like hickory smoke - poured us some wine, watched me melt into the couch, and asked, with a laugh, “are you going back tomorrow?” I went back the next day. And then every June for seven straight years, until the block party ended.
The smoker on my roof came out of those years. One June I had to miss the Saturday for a family event, and when I showed up Sunday morning, Luke and Phil - two of 17th Street’s pitmasters - said, Randy, we have a present for you. They’d gone to David B. Knight, the founder of Ole Hickory Pits, who’d brought the first production Ultra Que to the festival - a smoker about the size of a New York City mailbox, which is honestly the best way to describe it. Their pitch: David, we can truck this thing back to Illinois, power wash it, and then you can drive up from Missouri to retrieve it... or you can sell it to Randy for a few hundred bucks - he loves us, he’ll love it - and never think about it again. David didn’t hesitate. I paid $500 for a roughly $7,000 smoker, hired movers to haul 400 pounds of steel up the last flight of stairs to our roof, and it sits there still. Here’s the thing about that smoker: it wasn’t a discount. It was a relationship - David, Mike, me - and I’ve tried to be worthy of it ever since.
First cook on it: ribs. Nine racks for my company’s summer rooftop party, texting Luke for guidance the whole way. They came out incredible - truly. Seven racks for the team, one downstairs for my wife and kids, and one wrapped in foil for my friend Jeff’s birthday party in Brooklyn that night. Jeff set the rack out and it was gone in seconds. On my way out, he introduced me to his new business partner - Mario Carbone - and said, Randy’s the guy who made those ribs. Mario turned to me and said, “That’s the best barbecue I’ve had. Where’s your restaurant?” Jeff laughed, “he runs a consulting firm.” I have never let Mario live that down.
Since then, the pilgrimages. Big Bob Gibson in Decatur, Alabama. Louie Mueller in Taylor, Texas - Wayne Mueller’s family place, peppery and perfect. Kreuz Market in Lockhart. Skylight Inn in Ayden, North Carolina. Smoque in Chicago, where my friend Barry Sorkin spent a year and a half driving the country, learning from every region, before he opened. And when I didn’t know somebody, I’d call Amy - “can you introduce me?” - which is how I met Aaron Franklin of Franklin Barbecue in Austin.
The best I’ve ever had? Honest answer: it’s a toss-up of three. Franklin’s brisket. Hometown’s beef ribs. And an honorable mention for Smoque - which is great, but Barry’s my friend, so take that one with a grain of kosher salt.
The Franklin trip I’ll remember forever: two years ago my youngest son Hunter ran in the Junior Olympics Track & Field Championships in College Station, Texas, and I made sure our flights went through Austin. Waiting in line, Hunter - sixteen, merciless - says, “Dad, you’ve been completely hyping this place. No way it’s this good.” Then the woman slicing our order handed him a sample of brisket, and I watched his entire face change. Afterward we toured the pit room - pits Aaron built himself. That face is why you wait in the line.
And New York? Here’s where I’ll allow myself a little edge. Too much barbecue in this city is run as a business first, and you can taste it - inconsistent at best, fast food with smoke flavor at worst. The first year I volunteered at the Big Apple Block Party, I went to Fette Sau in Brooklyn a couple of weeks after a weekend at the pits, and it was so bad I wanted to get up, find the chef, and tell him he had done a crappy job. My friend - thankfully for politeness’s sake - stopped me. But then there’s Hometown BBQ in Red Hook — Bill Durney’s place. Bill came to barbecue the same unlikely way the rest of us did, only more so: he spent years running celebrity security details — Rihanna was one of his clients — before he bet it all on smoke. I was standing next to Mike Mills the day Bill brought him beef ribs he’d been working on for years before he opened a restaurant, and Mike said out loud, “Randy, these might be the best beef ribs in the United States.” I have never once disagreed. Not “good for New York.” Just great.
But here’s the story I keep coming back to. At the start of my son Spencer’s sophomore year at Cornell, he asked if I’d buy him a grill for the off-campus house. We went to Home Depot and picked one that could also act as a smoker. Later that year, he asked for something bigger than a grill - a brisket lesson, so he could make it for himself and the eight other guys in the house. I asked some colleagues at Cornell about sourcing from a great organic butcher, and landed on Autumn Harvest Farm in Romulus, New York: a Packer Cut, whole brisket. I purchased it so Spencer could pick it up at the Ithaca Farmers Market on a Sat in September of 2022. And then, for all ten hours of the smoke, Spencer and I were on the phone every hour. Temperature. Tenderness. Patience. Everything Mike and Luke and years on that roof had put into me, going through the cell towers to Ithaca. The pictures he sent that night - Spencer slicing the brisket, his housemates tasting what he’d made - are etched in my memory. That’s the whole thing, right there. Consistency and love. It isn’t a technique you master. It’s a thing you hand down.
So that’s what barbecue is to me - the history, the food, the hospitality of it all. The greats aren’t chasing reinvention. They’re doing the same thing with care every single day for people they want to feed. The magic was never a secret rub. It’s consistency you can taste - and love you can taste too.
More soon - I owe you a cook. And maybe, for the paid subscribers, the recipe from Mike and Amy’s book for a drink called Pink Pull-Your-Panties-Down Punch. It tastes like lemonade. It is not lemonade. Friends of ours once had to leave their car at our house one summer and walk home!
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