“Southern Barbecue,” the sociologist John Shelton Reed once wrote, “is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe’s wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.” New York is many hundreds of miles from the South, but, in the past ten years, the city has put itself on the barbecue map, with a style that’s not so much distinctly regional as it is an amalgamation of borrowed techniques, cherry-picked from the Meccas of the South and the Midwest. The success of this melting-pot model varies, but in Red Hook a Brooklyn native named Billy Durney has nailed a formula: mostly Texas, a touch of North Carolina and Kansas City, but very Brooklyn.
Durney started out by experimenting with a smoker at his South Park Slope apartment, as a way to relieve the stress of his job as “executive protection” (read: bodyguard) to “A-list celebrities” (whose identities he won’t reveal). Travelling through South America, he was inspired by the practice of cooking whole animals over fire pits on the beach, and a visit to Louie Mueller Barbecue, in Taylor, Texas, he said, “kinda changed my life.” A year ago, after a Hurricane Sandy setback, he opened Hometown in a garage converted to resemble a Texas dance hall, with exposed wooden rafters and an enormous American flag painted on a wall. In one room, twangy bands with names like the Sometime Boys perform on a small stage; in the other, patrons line up to order meat by the half pound, served in piles on butcher-paper-lined metal trays, along with sides in paper cups.
You could make a meal out of poultry (the smoked turkey is moist and flavorful, with a peppercorn crust), or pork (the jerk baby backs are almost char siu-like, scattered with green onions), or even lamb belly, which can be ordered alone or as a banh mi. But Durney’s beef is the greatest testament to his skill: he seasons it with just salt and pepper, then cooks it in a carefully controlled environment for fifteen hours overnight, tending oak fires out on Valentino Pier, three blocks away. The brisket is superlative but almost Puritan compared to the gigantic bone-on beef rib, its layers of rendered fat and fall-apart meat encrusted in a hard to achieve, intensely peppery yet sweet black bark, known in Texas as the “sugar cookie.”
There are sauces if you need them (you don’t): hot and sweet, Kansas City-style sticky, vinegary Carolina pepper. Creamy mac and cheese gets an extra drizzle of Velveeta-colored queso, collards are strewn with pulled pork, and spicy baked beans contain tender chunks of burnt-end brisket. Between the sugar cookie and the cakelike corn bread, dessert seems negligible, but banana-cream pudding, topped with crumbled Nilla Wafers, makes a perfect palate cleanser. ♦
Smoked meats $8-$14 per half pound, sides $3-$8. Open Tuesdays through Sundays for lunch and dinner.
