Good barbecue heralds a para-religious experience ...

Good barbecue heralds a para-religious experience because the meat endures a stint in a hot and smoky pit then gets carried in to me steaming upon a platter. The brisket lies freshly sacrificed in a heap on my tray, sliced, the juicy meat steaming, and its edges, like the casing of the sausage or the carnivorously alluring flesh of ribs, seared and sealed with sauce. This is the sacrament of an ancient religion filled with secret arcana, the myriad details of how to build a smoky fire from hickory or some other native wood conveying its Texas terroir and how to prepare the meat for cooking. Finally these choice morsels of beeves, swines, and fowls are left alone for a night in purgatory before swiftly pulling them off the grill over hot glowing fractals of mesquite, slicing them onto a plate, and delivering them to a hungry accolyte before the meat has had time to cool for more than a few degrees.

A cooling of more than a few degrees has chilled this review from five stars to three. I eat at Stubb's Bar-B-Q at least once a year, and last year they delivered barbecue perfect in timing, temperature, and flavor, with seemingly only seconds between grill and table. For the record, I am no foodie pilgrim I do not travel the world in search of perfection in every genre of cooking, and those finer points of appreciation that let glossy magazine reviewers distinguish among the fine points of slow-cooked, grilled meat so that they can point to some fly-speck on their maps and say, "Here, in this pueblito, is the joint with the best barbecue in Texas." No, I am no Prince of Ham and Beef, nor was meant to be. Deliver me a good plate, and my meter is pegged five stars for you, you, and you. Had I written this review after last year's meal at Stubb's, I would have given them five stars too.

This year, however, the meat was tepid, and if good barbecue comes off the grill filled with a holy spirit, this year's three-meat plate of brisket, ribs, and sausage had given up the ghost. The plate had apparently sat for a while: the meat had not only cooled, but the whole experience of the food on the palate had changed. It still was a long way from being that day-after mess with the fat in congealed white puddles beneath the meat you know what I mean if you've ever barbecued enough to have leftovers but, on the other hand, my lunch had taken the first big step in that direction.