As a former resident of Cowtown, USA, I had been eyeballing the KC Pit BBQ truck for a couple of weeks now. I finally visited the massive 18-wheeler over the weekend only to discover that the owners are based in…wait for it…Sandy Springs, Ga.

Not to worry. The owners, according to KC Pit BBQ’s designed-within-an-inch-of-its-life Web site, moved to the Atlanta suburb after living in the Kansas City area, where they learned the local barbecue traditions.

Given Kansas City’s affection for ribs, I opted for the spare ribs ($11 for a generous portion, probably a half-rack). Not that I had much choice. It was either that or rib tips (not a fan of the cartilage) or a hamburger and hot dog (which, last I checked, didn’t really fit under the K.C. barbecue banner).

The woman at the cash register told me the ribs were smoked over hickory wood for 10 hours, then finished on the grill until they were fall-off-the-bone good. I knew right then they weren’t going to be my kind of ribs.

I prefer ribs with a little chew left on them, so that your teeth have to clench into the meat and detach it from the bone, caveman-style. I also like a lot more seasoning than what the KC Pit BBQ ribs had to offer. They were decidedly sweet, too, with a wimpy smoke penetration that didn’t bespeak a 10-hour pit stop.

The worst part, however, was the ribs’ exterior. It had hardened into something rubbery, likely the result of excessive mopping of the ribs and too much time away from the smoker. I have no idea how KC Pit BBQ holds its meat, but whatever method the cooks employ, it’s not doing the ribs any favors.

With that said, the ribs were more than passable when dunked into KC Pit BBQ’s tangy sauce, which is important to remember when judging K.C.-style ‘cue. The city really digs sauce.

Still, I’d love to try KC Pit BBQ’s ribs straight out of the smoker. I suspect their texture is far better, even if they remain too sweet for me.

The tractor-trailer has been hovering in the District for a few weeks now, serving up K.C.-style ribs and rib tips, among other smoky things. Y&H stopped by for a visit this weekend and sampled the ribs. I’ll post more about that later, but in the meantime, I thought you might be interested in a look inside this portable kitchen, which is actually based in Georgia, not Kansas City (more on that later, too).

According to this specs page, the nearly 54-foot-long truck features:

• Walk in Cooler
• Walk in Freezer
• Dry Storage Area
• Total Interchangeable Kitchen
• Double Stack Convection Oven
• 6-Hole Steam Table & Upright Warmers
• Grill/Stove top
• Deep Fryers
• 4-Drawing Cabinet
• Hand Sink
• 3-Hole Dish Sink/Dishwashing Station
• Plasma Screen Televisions equipped with Satellite and Surround Sound
• Storm Curtains in the case of inclement weathers
• 100 Gallon Diesel Storage
• 300 Gallon Fresh Water tank

The Calbi Korean BBQ truck

These eerie, elegant, silent videos on Los Angeles’ food trucks speak volumes about the richness of the city’s street snacks — and the dearth of decent offerings we still have in the District. Take a look at the vids after the jump and try not to drool with resentment.


The COOLHAUS Ice Cream truck

The Don Chow taco truck

The Buttermilk truck

Babys Badass Burgers truck

Barbie’s Q truck

Bool Korean BBQ taco truck

The funny thing is, Judge didn’t even intend for the finale to be the finale.

The owners of Urban Bar-B-Que plan to open a third location of their small smokehouse chain in the former Willoughby’s Market in Sandy Spring, pitmaster David Calkins told Y&H over the weekend.

The lease has been signed, and since the space won’t require a massive build-out for the restaurant, Calkins expects to open the latest Urban within a month, if not sooner. Even better, Urban will install a Southern Pride XLR-600 smoker in the Sandy Spring spot; the giant machine, able to smoke hundreds of pounds of meat for 12 hours with split logs, was in large part responsible for Y&H’s recent re-evaluationof the barbecue joint in Rockville. (The lack of an XLR-600 at the Urban location in Silver Spring also explains its inferior meats.)

At the time of my March re-review, owners Calkins and Lee Howard said they were thinking about expanding the Urban mini-empire. But they thought they would do it with a centralized smoking operation; in other words, they thought they would smoke the meats at one location and then quickly truck them to the outlying Urban dining locations. I asked Calkins why the change of plans.

“It’s important to have an on-site smoker,” Calkins says. “People want to smell the aroma.”

I couldn’t argue with that, given how often I have been sucked into ’cue joints merely by the smell of smoking meats. Calkins said the menu at Sandy Spring will be exactly the same as the one at the other locations. He did float the idea that he might add some items, like salads or buttermilk fried chicken, but emphasized that if you like something at the old Urban, you’ll find it at the new one.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

Laugh if you will, but the WFM Smokehouse inside the Fair Lakes Whole Foods store is no joke. The woman in charge is Maria Mercado, a Salvadoran native who used to cook almost exclusively with wood back in her home country. She now smokes hundreds of pounds of beef, chicken, and pork in a massive Southern Pride unit on the premises, employing a combination of cherry, maple, and hickory wood. She and her team pull out meats at all hours of the day, whether for takeout orders or those souls who want to dine right there at the counter, just a stone’s throw from the Emeril Green set. The “Kitchen Sink” platter, which comes with four meats and three sides, is enough to feed two hungry people and a stray dog. The simple spice-rubbed brisket is the star; it’s carved into these thick, intense, sweetly smoked slices that bulge with fatty deposits. Best of all, you can chase your Kitchen Sink of smoked meats with a bottle of suds available at the nearby craft-beer refrigeration case.

Addendum: Read Y&H’s full report on the WFM Smokehouse.

WFM Smokehouse, 4501 Market Commons Drive, Fairfax, Va. 22033, (703) 222-2058

Photo by Tim Carman

Here’s the new baby: a Brinkmann Smoke N Grill, with a separate wood box.  If you ever decide to buy one of these beasts, do what my barbecue mentor, Jim Shahin, suggested: Have Home Depot put it together for you.

Where was the chimney starter in my youth? With one of these things as a kid, I could have satisfied nearly all of my pyromania without any residual damage to house or garden. Here, I’m merely getting the charcoal ready. It will serve as my base heat source, on top of which I will throw wood chunks, which I have soaked in water.

Many barbecue books suggest saucing the ribs before — and while — smoking them.  This approach produces, by and large, Memphis or Kansas City-style ribs, which I like well enough. But I wanted to smoke my first rack Texas-style, so I opted for nothing more than a simple salt-pepper-cayenne rub. I also removed the membrane on the back of the ribs, which is a bitch.

One of the problems of cooking with wood is the vast amount of smoke it produces. It wafts into the house, into the neighborhood, and into the very pores of your skin. You smell like a forest fire for at least 24 hours. The other problem, as I discovered, is that wood chunks burn faster than money in a teenager’s pocket. I burned through my bag of chunks before the ribs had even taken on any color or smoke. Plus, my barrel temperature just wasn’t staying hot enough. It kept dipping down to around 200 degrees. I wanted to maintained a temperature of about 250 degrees.

As if summoned by the Gods of desperation, barbecue mentor Jim and his wife, Jessica Shahin, made a surprise visit. I had called Jim earlier to see if he and Jessica wanted to come over for ribs (i.e., help me smoke them), but they had previous plans. Fortunately for me, they broke them at the last minute. Once descended from the heavens, Jim quickly assessed the situation and determined I had at least two problems: that I needed a crap load more wood in the firebox (which I kinda figured) and that the charcoal I was using (this Whole Foods hippie natural-wood bullshit) burns very fast, which means that you need to keep adding and adding and adding the stuff to maintain a constant temperature. Or have more split hardwood handy, which I obviously didn’t.

Jim’s suggestion to save the ribs from disaster was to move them briefly from the barrel to the actual firebox, where they would benefit from some high, direct heat. Then, after moving the ribs back to the barrel, he suggested I rip open the Kingsford Match Light Charcoal (which I also had on hand) and fuel that firebox as if I were shoveling coal into the boiler of a steam locomotive.  He also showed me a few tips for controlling temperature when the fire gets too hot.

Jim’s suggestions did the trick. The backyard was starting to smell of dripping fat and grilled pork — and lighter fluid, or whatever the hell Matchlight puts on those coals to make them ignite so easily. So much for my gently smoked ribs. Still, the smells were tantalizing…and not just to us bipeds. Coltrane was ready to eat, too.

The meal was finally ready around 10 p.m., or about two hours later then I had expected. The ribs were passable. They were too salty, the result of my zealous seasoning at the beginning. But they were also a little too chewy; they would have benefitted from another hour on the grill. Of course, my “smoked” ribs would have really been better with, you know, real smoke flavor, too. But at least Carrie’s side of roasted summer squash was killer.

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

Three different vehicles have taken up residence at the back end of a massive parking lot that serves the Safeway grocery store at 514 Rhode Island Ave. NE. One is a converted 1995 school bus now outfitted with deep-fryers, prep tables, and coolers. The second is a square white panel truck that hauls around a giant generator, and the final is a beat-up red Chevy 1500 pickup with an equally well-used Southern Pride smoker propped up on cinder blocks in the bed.

This sprawling mobile barbecue empire belongs to Fate Pittman, a 73-year-old pitmaster who has been smoking pork, beef, and chicken for more than 30 years. Except no one calls Pittman by his family name. Everyone knows him by the handle painted onto his vehicles: Mr. P.

Mr. P is a large graying man, his fingers as plump as sausages. He doesn’t move around that well anymore. He blames it on a bad back, which he injured decades ago while working in the auto-body repair business before he turned to barbecue. It’s with some reluctance that I ask Mr. P to extract himself from his comfortable perch inside his school bus to show me around. I tell him that I’m sorry, but I only half mean it. The fact is, I’m on a mission. A guy who makes pork ribs this good needs some love from the local food press.

The barbecue man sells a number of items from the main window on the side of his bus. He sells fried whiting, barbecue chicken, oversized sections of smoked beef ribs, and a whole mess of side dishes, from coleslaw to collards. The chicken is pretty fine, both smoky and moist, but his beef ribs are chewy and dehydrated—and yet shockingly still edible, like a good meaty jerky. (I’ve heard tell that on his better days, Mr. P’s beef ribs are a work of art, which gives you an idea of how fickle barbecue is.)

But the main reason to hop aboard Mr. P’s bus is to order his pork ribs. They are, without any doubt in my mind, the best pork ribs in the area. They’re charred. They’re crispy around the edges. They’re moist and pink inside. They’re smoky and salty and meaty and, goddamn it, I want a whole rack right now! Because Mr. P is from western North Carolina, he serves his meats with a ketchup-based barbecue sauce. I wouldn’t bother with it; like good Texas ’cue, his meats don’t need the extra flavor.

Mr. P didn’t always used to work out of a school bus. At one point in his barbecue career, he says, he had real brick-and-mortar stores, mostly takeout oriented. But then he got into the mobile smoke business up in Chillum, which was a thriving concern, as Mr. P describes it, until Prince George’s County started cracking down on street food vendors. That’s how he ended up in this godforsaken Safeway parking lot.

Because of his age, Mr. P has plenty of help with his business. Victor “Preacher Man” Wilson is his day-to-day pitmaster, tending to the hickory and oak logs that fuel the Southern Pride. Wilson is also the one who makes sure the meats, especially those simple spice-rubbed ribs, don’t smoke too long. But Mr. P also has Belinda Roberson, who works the window and prepares all the sides, including the baked beans and potato salad, which she says are the bestsellers. Roberson has been working with Mr. P, she says, for 30 years.

“We’re two of his secret weapons to keep it going,” says Preacher Man, who’s been working with Mr. P, off and on, for 10 years. “We’re him when he’s not here.”

Except that may not be the case in the near future. Mr. P is thinking about retiring. “Don’t you think it’s time?” he asks me rhetorically. The problem is, he may not have anyone left to carry on the business, including his four children. “They don’t want to mess with it,” Mr. P says. “They got their own things.” Even worse, neither Roberson nor Preacher Man think they can afford to buy out the business.

All three of them—Mr. P, Preacher Man, and Roberson—seem to sense that the business is on its last legs. Which may explain why they’re pushing so hard for one last request. They really want me to try to get a message to President Obama: Go visit Mr. P’s Ribs and shake the owner’s hand.

“He tried Five Guys,” Preacher Man says, “Tell him to try this here.”

Mr. P’s Ribs and Fish is located in the Safeway parking lot at 514 Rhode Island Ave. NE. It operates from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.