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

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

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.