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“SOUTHERN BARBECUE,” THE SOCIOLOGIST John Shelton Reed once wrote, “is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe’s wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.” New York is many hundreds of miles from the South, but, in the past ten years, the city has put itself on the barbecue map, with a style that’s not so much distinctly regional as it is an amalgamation of borrowed techniques, cherry-picked from the Meccas of the South and the Midwest. The success of this melting-pot model varies, but in Red Hook a Brooklyn native named Billy Durney has nailed a formula: mostly Texas, a touch of North Carolina and Kansas City, but very Brooklyn.
Durney started out by experimenting with a smoker at…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, Oct-06-14