I haven’t lived in Brooklyn for decades, but during the 30 years I did live there, I never once ventured into the neighborhood known as Red Hook. Never wanted to. Why? I blame Thomas Wolfe.

I encountered his short story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” at an early age, and Red Hook was depicted as a place in which a teenager most definitely would not want to wander. (Well, this teenager anyway.)

I’m sure the area had changed between the 1936 publication of the story in The New Yorker and the time I first read it in the early ’70s, but still … I had no plans to go there. And so never did. Until Tuesday, when I was brought there by BBQ.

Hometown Bar-B-Que, to be precise.

Eater‘s Ryan Sutton had recently declared Hometown to be “the city’s best barbecue restaurant,” and when someone like Sutton says something like that, all of Wolfe’s warnings vanish. And so, since I had plans to be in New York on the last day of June, I put out a call on Twitter and Facebook for friends willing to meet me for burnt ends in Brooklyn.

Rising to the challenge were Moshe Feder, an editor at Tor Books, Sean Redlitz, a former Syfy coworker currently at CNN, and Claudia Szabo, an Associate Dean from the University of Adelaide, who happened to be visiting NY … and more importantly, happened to be a foodie up for such a trek.

Here we are at the end of the meal, with the remnants of our meat orgy littering the table …

… but let’s start at the beginning.

After walking 5.1 miles from the Society of Illustrators at 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue all the way down to Pier 11 near the tip of Manhattan (hey, I needed to earn that BBQ), I took the IKEA water taxi across the East River to Brooklyn. I arrived about 45 minutes earlier than my friends would, but that was OK, for I got a chance to hang with Billy Durney, the owner and pitmaster of Hometown Bar-B-Que, who gave me a tour behind the counter and promised to set aside one of his 10 remaining beef ribs so it’d still be available when I was ready to order.

And with the aroma in that place, holding back from ordering until Moshe, Sean, and Claudia arrived was tough! (Hope you appreciated it, guys.) So I sat at the bar with a root beer imported from Louisiana …

… and studied the menu.

I knew I was going to need that beef rib, which I understood was humongous, and brisket of course, and I was looking forward to some of that lamb belly as well … but by the time my friends arrived and we got up to order, the lamb belly was gone. And they were down to the last brisket and half! Which, according to Durney, is unusual for that time of the night in the middle of the week, caused only by the surprise appearance of a wedding party at lunch.

Here’s what my tray looked like after I’d moved through the line. That beef rib, a half-pound of brisket, a single spare rib, and three sides—smoked pit beans, collard greens, and corn bread.

I will be forever grateful that as part of my brisket order, Durney gave me the only burnt ends that remained, sliced from the final brisket. You can almost see them peeking out from beneath the slices. My first bite was the cause of the loudest groan of the night, and I had to explain to my companions, none of whom I’d previously dined with before, that when joining me at a meal of this high a quality, if you were blindfolded, you’d be uncertain if you were at a dinner or an orgy.

But about that beef rib, which Durney told me had been cooked for nine hours. It was easily the best I’d ever eaten. Here I am, beginning to dig in, with a sense of scale provided by my mouth vs. that mighty rib. It was extremely tender, extremely flavorful …

… and extremely impossible for any single person to eat who doesn’t happen to be a professional competitive eater, as you can see by my failure to finish it. But don’t worry—I shared plenty with my friends before smacking my lips all over it.

And about the sides, of which I wish I’d gotten better photos … they were some of the best I’ve ever had at a BBQ joint. And the smoked pit beans, which contained chunks of burnt ends, easily were the best.

You know how some food, no matter how great, becomes less appetizing with each successive bite, as hunger is assuaged and you’re less ravenous? Not so with those beans. From the first spoon to the last, from the beginning of the meal to the end, they wowed us all every time. I could easily see getting a large portion and making an entire meal from them. (Not that that’ll ever be likely, considering the pull of the meats. But still.) And the collard greens, with smoked pork shoulder, were also amazing. As was the corn bread. (I didn’t spare room for the cole slaw or potato salad, but from what my friends told me, they’re worth trying, too.)

As for the desserts, I picked up one each of the two they offered, plus four spoons, for by then, all we needed was a small taste to put a period at the end of the sentence of the meal. So we shared a banana cream pudding …

… and a chocolate pudding pie.

The banana pudding was homemade, while the chocolate pudding pie, based on the menu, was brought in from Robicelli’s, a bakery in Bay Ridge. My advice about both of these is—dig deep with those spoons! I wasn’t as impressed by my first mouthfuls as I was once I made sure to get all the layers with a single taste. They made for a soothing finish to an amazing meal.

While I haven’t eaten at as many BBQ joints in NYC as has Ryan Sutton, and moved away so long ago that I’ve only experienced a fraction of the city’s BBQ renaissance, it’s hard to believe there can be better BBQ out there. Once you set the bar this high, for another pitmaster to jump over it wouldn’t be easy.

As we prepared to leave, around 8:30 p.m., a glance at the wall told us we’d arrived just in time. SOLD OUT signs had blossomed across the menu.

Outside, as we stood on the corner planning our various escapes from Red Hook, I couldn’t resist leaping onto a bench on pretending to hold the wall’s Hometown logo high over my head as if I were Atlas.

But was I Atlas? Or was I … Superman?

With all that oh-so-perfect meat in my belly, I certainly felt super-powered.

And with that, it was back to Amtrak to catch the 10:05 train south toward home. Where, the next day, I felt no need for lunch.

I was that satiated.

I guess I should apologize to Thomas Wolfe, because regardless of what he wrote, I can’t wait to get back to Red Hook. And this time, I’ll make sure I arrive early enough to get my lips around some of that lamb belly!