Back in March, owner/pitmaster Bryan Furman was named a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation's Best Chef Southeast Award. The short history of B's Cracklin' Barbeque can only be described as a roller coaster ride. Home Team's smoked chicken wings, topped with a tangy Alabama-style white sauce, are some of the best anywhere. Those smoked meats are sliced and served on traditional platters with housemade pickles but are also incorporated into more modern creations, like pit-cooked pastrami sandwiches and ramen with smoked shrimp. That means pork, beef, chicken, and more cooked on Lang and Oyler pits fired with red oak. Founder Aaron Siegel and executive chef Taylor Garrigan came to barbecue from fine dining kitchens, and they apply classical culinary technique to traditional wood-cooked barbecue. Smack dab in the heart of the Charleston peninsula, the Williman Street location, with its large dining room and big outdoor patio, it's the ideal place to sample Home Team's inventive blend of old and new. Home Team is a rising South Carolina barbecue empire, with three restaurants in Charleston, one up the road in Columbia, and one way out in Aspen, Colorado. You can think of that list as the "readers' choice" and this one as the "editor's picks." There is plenty of overlap between the two rankings, though, for as much as Southerners love to argue about barbecue, the cream tends to rise to the top. That selection is voted on by our readers-some 65,000 of them. Note: This list should not be confused with Southern Living's Best in the South, which was released back in April. Those restaurants that moved up in the rankings did so primarily because of flavor-that little extra juiciness or kiss of smoke that makes you say, "wow," and sends you diving back to the plate for more.Fortunately for Southern barbecue fans, there are plenty of great "wow" moments out there. Be it slow-smoked brisket or charcoal-grilled ribs or even house-cured pastrami, nothing else matters if the barbecue isn't delicious. We try to cast as wide a net as possible, too, seeking out the restaurants that best embody the particular barbecue style of their region.In the end, though, it all comes down to the quality of the 'cue. Whether it's a bare-bones take-out stand or a full-service restaurant with a wine list and clean restrooms, each place needs a spirit and flair that's all its own. The overall dining experience is important: the physical setting, the aroma from the pits, the sauces and dishes served alongside. The theme noted in 2018's list continues this year: the barbecue scene in the South just keeps getting better, and restaurants need to stay on top of their game to compete.The rankings may have changed this year, but the criteria remain the same. ("New", of course, is a relative term in the Southern barbecue world, where being open a mere half century is nothing to write home about.)Quite a few of the restaurants on last year's list have moved up or down in the rankings as we went back and revisited previous years' picks and compared them with other contenders. A number of new players debuted on the Top 50 list this year, too. To the dismay of Carolinians, three slots opened up when a trio of beloved restaurants closed their doors: Cannon's BBQ & More in Little Mountain and Jackie Hite's in Leesville, South Carolina, and Allen & Son's in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which previously held the #5 slot.In a pleasant twist, one of those open slots has been filled by a South Carolina joint that had previously fallen off the Top 50 list, since McCabe's Bar-B-Que in Manning reopened after being closed for a few years due to family illness. Last year we took the risky step of listing our picks in ranked order, and we're doing it again in 2019.There has been quite a bit of movement within the rankings this year. ![]() After a long summer spent driving down lonely country roads, sampling prodigious quantities of smoked meats and delicious sides, and repeatedly stain-treating shirts, it's time to release Southern Living's 2019 list of the Top 50 Barbecue Joints in the South.
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