Best Of Award

BEST BBQ

Bugling Bull Trading Post

Barbecue is complicated. You've got your Southern-style and your coastal, your K.C. classic with its smoky-sweet sauce and your vinegary Carolina tidewater; there's Texas barbecue that's mostly beef, Midwestern chicken and deep-South hot links. Everyone has a favorite style and a favorite place. But you find the very best barbecue -- from rub to sauce to meat and heat -- in the least likely locations. At the newly legal Bugling Bull Trading Post, for example, a hillbilly, white-trash barbecue brought to us by pit man Mike Frislie. He does chicken and hot dogs, he does baby-backs and country ribs with a pepper-heavy rub, smoke all the way to the bone, and a sauce that's sweet-hot, a little spicy and tasty as hell. He does whatever occurs to him to do that day by the side of Highway 67, working with three box smokers and one drum cooker in the dust-and-gravel parking lot, offering his brilliance for prices so low that it almost feels like stealing when you drive away with the best barbecue around.