Pearson's Texas Barbecue Lives Up to the Hype

Barbecue is the most elemental food, I think. You cook meat; you eat meat. There are hundreds of permutations, regional variations and disagreements, but the meat must be cooked over some kind of non-oven device, and the meat must be eaten, preferably with little decorum.

Right now, consensus is that the best barbecue in New York is served in Jackson Heights, Queens, at Pearson's Barbecue, in the back of Legends sports bar. Pearson's, since its reopening, has been acclaimed so many times, by so many publications, that it's become one of those places, like the Pakistani Tea House on Church St., whose remoteness and obscurity contribute to their fame. So it's amazing to see how small it is, and that you can go there for dinner on a Wednesday evening and be pretty much alone, surrounded by a few tables and chairs, looking up at one of the six tv's, watching a Yankees game and sipping a pitcher of Bud from the bar.

Pearson's story has some good dramatic elements to it, as a once-proud restaurant now residing in the back of a sports bar should. Robert Pearson, whom Chowhound.com (a pretty good site, if you're into eating as cultural anthropology, though be prepared to engage in some large pissing contests) refers to as a former celebrity hairdresser, opened the place in Long Island City as Stick to Your Ribs Barbecue, a sub-billing that the current Pearson's still enjoys. Things were going along swimmingly until he opened another branch on the Upper West Side, on that frat row in the 80s on Amsterdam. That's where I first tasted the stuff. It was good, though my dad, an ardent Pearson's proselytizer, thought it was obvious they didn't have the same smoker as in Queens. TheManhattan branch was closed after a year or so in the wake of a fire, and, well, you know how that goes. Pearson left it in the hands of partner Ellen Goldberg, who, connoisseurs say, only improved the barbecue. Then the LIC mainstay tanked, supposedly due to complaints that the smoking was disturbing the neighborhood. So they relocated to residential Jackson Heights in the fall of 1999.

Legends is nestled between an animal hospital and Titas Halal Meat and Grocery (they serve baby goat) on an undistinguished side street. There's a backyard where you can eat, but on the night we were there it was temporarily closed. They were hosing down the kitchen, and the used water drains into the backyard. We sat inside. The waitress (not the one in the Knicks cap and the Yankees jersey, but the one in the plain sportswear) was quite nice, and convinced us of the wisdom of ordering pitchers of Budweiser; they're cheaper, by volume, than bottles. True, we countered, but they're worse. Ah the hell with it, bring us a pitcher.

Plaques screwed to the bar attested to the many Celtic Dart League championships of Legends, while a man at the bar convinced a wide-eyed 10-year-old that he had been the Yankees shortstop before Derek Jeter.

In the brightly lit back room, the smoker comprised the centerpiece of the restaurant. It's about my shoulder height, cylindrical and shinily metallic. It looks like the 1950s vision of the cryogenics of 2010. I didn't get a close look, but there positively have to be dials recording the internal pressure.

The idea of the smoker is that it cooks the meat for a long time at a low temperature. So in theory it's really the smoke that cooks the meat, rather than flame. The additional benefit of the long smoking is that it melts most of the fat, some of which the meat soaks up. This makes the meat less dry, and a little sweeter and more tasty. Good Texas barbecue avoids heavy and sweet sauces, because the meat is already moist and slightly sweet, allowing the natural meat flavor to poke through. This is why Pearson's pork shoulder ($13 per pound) tastes quite porcine, easily distinguishable from the beef brisket ($14 per pound). Though all the barbecued meats have the same obvious smokiness, you taste chicken, pig and cow distinctly. The pulled chicken ($13 per pound) comes chopped up a fair bit, and this lets the crunchy skin slide off easily, giving you a mouthful of slightly charred crust before the meatiness of the chicken takes over.

The pork ribs ($14.50 per pound) are also excellent. They, like the rest of the dishes, come in red-and-white-checkered paper baskets, like an order of cheese fries at the state fair. In my experience, ribs err in two directions. They're either tough to tear off the bone, and a little tasteless, or they fall off the bone only to dissolve in an unpleasant gooey and fatty mess in your mouth. That's why in recent years I've been ordering my ribs mostly in Chinese restaurants, which, though the ribs aren't great, usually manage a decent textural consistency. Pearson's ribs made me remember ribs. They come off the bone easily, without much work, but they retain some integrity once they're in your mouth. There's some sinew, some slight stringiness that gives you something to ruminate and a greater opportunity to savor the smoked pig.

The sauces are vinegary and don't overly influence the taste of the meat. They guide instead of overpowering the smokiness. The meat isn't barbecued in the sauce, and you don't slather sauce on afterward, unlike more traditionally Southern barbecue, which relies on heavy sauces to make up a good part of the taste. Chowhound says, "It's essential to understand that while Deep South 'cue was developed by poor or enslaved African-Americans to render delicious the worst cast-off cuts of meat, Texas barbecue was developed by butchers seeking to extend the shelf life of good cuts." Sounds like a good-enough explanation. I can't speak to historical theories of barbecue, but I do know that none of the sauces?mild, medium, mad or mean?is very hot.

Eat all this either on, or in combination with, the excellent Portuguese rolls. They're slightly flat, and you can bite into them easily, but they don't get soggy from meat or sauce, or coleslaw. We ordered the pork beans ($1.50) and the onion rings ($2.25) as our vegetables because, well, that's the kind of place this is. They're both great, but the nod goes to the onion rings. A loop of fairly fresh onion is surrounded by a crust at least three times the diameter of the onion. They're very crunchy, and heavy.

On your way back to the subway station, take a slight detour and stop in at the upstairs pingpong parlor. Watch a sweaty white guy get schooled by one of the pros and realize that table tennis is set for a major revival. Then get on the train.

Pearson's Texas Barbecue, in Legends, 71-04 35th Ave. (71st St.), Jackson Heights, 718-779-7715.