How would you like to pack your bags and spend the next half-year doing nothing but traveling around the U.S., stopping at every barbecue restaurant from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine? At each ‘cue shack, the owner would skip forth from the kitchen bearing a platter of the house specialties for your delectation. As the months pass, the numbers grow. Before long, you will have eaten at several hundred barbecue restaurants. You can taste the individual ingredients in the sauce. Your tongue can actually tell how many hours a rib has been in the smoker. If the potato salad isn’t perfect, you lean to the left and surrender it to a silver spittoon engraved “Boss.”
This is the (somewhat exaggerated) reality for Johnny Fugitt, a St. Louisan who sold his house and began the next phase of his life as a barbecue nomad.
Since last October, Johnny Fugitt has definitely had my dream job: travel across America, try all of the barbecue, and rank the restaurants.
(h/t)