New York City has slowly become a barbecue town, and one of the destinations that continues to deliver is Hometown Bar-B-Que. Despite its location in Red Hook far from subway stations, the restaurant regularly has long lines extending out the door. We showed up on a warm September Saturday in the late afternoon before the dinner rush and still had a 40-minute wait time. But in the end, it was probably worth it.

Hometown Bar-B-Que opened in September of 2013, a year later than expected. Hurricane Sandy ravaged Red Hook with a storm surge that flooded the first floor of every building. Pitmaster Billy Durney and restaurateur Christopher Miller had just received approval from the community board on October 22, 2012 and were set to open when, a week later, the massive hurricane swept across the city and flooded their restaurant.

Durney’s journey to becoming one of the city’s best pitmasters isn’t a traditional route. During the 2000s, he primarily found himself in upscale New York City restaurants while working as a personal bodyguard for celebrities. He doesn’t actually have much formal training in the restaurant industry. He told Brad Thomas Parsons at Punch that he began his barbecue career smoking meat on a backyard Weber Grill. Those failed experiments led him to spend two years touring barbecue joints from Texas to North Carolina. Trained on the country’s best, he returned to Brooklyn looking to create something new.

Durney also told Parsons he has always been drawn to the city’s fine dining restaurants, which might explain why his latest project is not another barbecue location (there’s already a second Hometown in Industry City and a third in Miami), but rather a fancy restaurant on billionaire’s ro.

My first time at Hometown Bar B Que was on a weeknight, in the summer of 2016. It was my birthday, the middle of July when the city was hot and humid. I wanted an excuse to get all my friends to ride the IKEA ferry, a yellow water taxi running from Manhattan to the isolated Red Hook neighborhood. This was before NYC had launched the NYC Ferry Service, and riding a ferry on the East River was as much a gimmick as it was a mode of transportation.

Back in 2016, there was no line when we showed up. Red Hook is a sleepy neighborhood most of the time, and unique in that it attracts weekend tourists from the city itself. It’s like a Hudson Valley village, right in Brooklyn (though don’t confuse it with the actual Hudson Valley village just north of Rhinebeck). We all had a good time that night with plenty of beer. The food was good enough I swore I would be back.

Nine years later, pushing a sleeping four-year-old in a stroller, my wife and I were ready for late lunch or early dinner. Hometown’s address is Van Brunt Street, the only street in Red Hook anyone ever knows, but the entrance is on Reed Street overlooking the Fairway parking lot.

Fairway was gutted by private equity, which is basically the story anytime private equity gets anywhere near food, and closed down a few years back. The Fairway is now a Food Bazaar, but I’m not sure anyone would know what you were talking about if you didn’t call it Fairway.

Reed Street was closed to traffic and Hometown had picnic tables set up and a line coming out the door. A waiter was taking drink orders and since the baby toddler four-year-old was asleep in the stroller, we decided it was worth waiting.

Waiting on line with us was a Frenchman, a few years (decades) younger than us who had a visa for a few months. We chatted a bit, and explained the menu items to him. It was his first time at a barbecue joint. He ended up deciding on the beef rib, a $45-per-pound monstrosity that I’m sure is delicious but mostly means you’re probably not sampling the remaining menu.

My wife and I considered our options. If there was one thing I recalled about my 2016 trip, it was that the brisket was totally serviceable but also not that memorable. I ended up ordering a quarter pound anyway just to make sure my memory wasn’t betraying me.

One of the challenges here is the excessively long line means you’ve basically got to commit to your entire meal when you finally step up to the meat man. There’s no going back for seconds or ordering an extra quarter pound of something. Plus you don’t want to order too much and end up with a lot of left overs miles from the nearest subway.

Most of our order was piled up on our tray at the register, with two specialty items delivered to the table by number. There’s probably a good argument to be made here that the kitchen could handle a lot more diners per hour with some minor adjustment to how this process takes place, but I suspect the long wait is actually a kind of kitsch, a built-in marketing scheme that also solves the other problem, which is an undersized dining room. Since it was a gorgeous day, the tables outside in the street were filled leaving plenty of space indoors. If they moved orders through any faster, that might not be the case.

We started with the brisket queso served with tortilla chips. I love a good queso, and this was it. There was plenty of brisket in the cheesy sauce, but I’m not sure how much flavor it was bringing to the party. Nevertheless it was good enough for me to clean out the cup with a finger.

If there was one criticism here, I would happily had a higher level of heat from the peppers.

I’m a sucker for good collared greens at barbecue joints. I always want them to be good, and sometimes I’m surprised by them. Here the greens were a bit underflavored. The bitterness was taken out of them nicely though, and there was plenty of barbecue sauce to enhance them. In my case, a little sweet and spicy sauce helped them along.

The beans are my wife’s go-to side dish. These were a stunningly good addition to our plate. They captured the ideal sweet and spicy flavor of barbecue beans, and had this creamy texture that is fairly unique among Brooklyn barbecue.

My wife ordered the cornbread. I’m not usually a fan of cornbread, at least not since Brooklyn Star closed. They served theirs in a cast iron skillet, usually with jalapeño or bacon in it. Too many cornbreads are dry and flavorless. I was mistaken. This was absolutely an amazing slice of bread.

The thing I usually dislike about restaurant cornbread is how dry and grainy it is. This cornbread came with melted butter and honey spooned over it. It’s hard to beat that.

The brisket was a fine experience, but one that reminded me why I thought we could skip it. Its tender, and the exposed, seasoned edges have amazing flavor. The sprinkle of salt is a nice touch to help enhance the meat’s flavor.

However, overall all I think this brisket is only so good; its an easy dish to leave behind and go for something more interesting. I doctored it with the various sauces, and for this it was a great medium for smoke, sweet, and spicy barbecue sauces.

The pulled pork swims in its own rendered fat. That keeps it from drying out, but made it a bit greasy. Still, I would order this again, and absolutely recommend it over the brisket. There was real flavor there and in small quantities, I don’t mind a bit of grease. It was another opportunity to sample the selection of sauces too.

Then we had two of the best things of all time arrive at our table. First, the slab of pastrami bacon. It had an excellent ratio of season to meat. The fat had been largely rendered out and it was served with a bit of sweet mustard.

The bacon one of the best components of this meal.

Finally we got to the Korean ribs. These fell off the bone and were rich with umami flavor, with a hint of sweetness. There was a lot of nice texture from the onions too, which also brought some bright freshness to the table.

Overall, the Korean ribs were an absolute treat, and pretty dish to look at too.

We were only about halfway done with the meal when the four-year-old began to stir. There were no fries on this menu, so were never going to sate his appetite. We offered him a bit of corn bread, which he knows only as “yellow bread” from the 3K lunches provided at his school. He wasn’t interested. A few fruit snacks kept his demons at bay while we finished up.

The food at Hometown not only still holds up, and I understand why there are still lines more than a decade after opening. It’s a cut above a lot of other barbecue options in New York City, and maybe only Fette Sau really keeps up with it. More importantly, Hometown isn’t trying to be something else. It’s not Kansas City or Oklahoma or Texas or Carolina barbecue. It’s distinctly Brooklyn, très Brooklyn in some respects, with a kind of twee interpretation of southern decor, but more importantly it’s very Brooklyn in the way flavors and cuisines and influences have melted together into something new.

---