<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">I love barbecue. I love it as much as I hate malls. In fact, barbecue is the polar opposite of mall food—a cuisine that induces pleasures through waiting, through long, slow, patient hours of blissful anticipation.
So imagine my distress when I learned that one of my favorite barbecue joints ( Jones Barbeque)opened a second location . . . in a mall—in a mall food court—in Bellevue's Crossroads Mall. It was that good—just as good as Jones Barbeque's original location on MLK Way in Columbia City. So good, in fact, that it had made us forget we were eating in a mall food court.

Take R & L Home of Good Bar-B-Q, run since 1952 by four generations of the Davis family, the first family of Seattle barbecue. Tucked away on a tree-lined Central District street, R & L still cranks out some of Seattle's best barbecue, 50 years after owner Mary Davis' Louisiana-born mother and her friend, the Rev. Mitchell, opened the place out of sheer frustration with Seattle's lack of barbecue joints.

In the South, when barbecue lovers see an old, abandoned gas station, they think, "Oh, there's a good place for a barbecue joint!" Kind of like Pecos Pit in SoDo. In 1980, Debra and Ronald Wise decided that happiness was more important than making lots of money in the rat race. So they opened Pecos Pit, Seattle's best barbecue sandwich joint, in an old gas station on First Avenue South.

Robert Porter hails from Louisiana via Las Vegas, where he opened his first barbecue joint in 1960. He opened the General's BBQ in 1980 on East Madison, then moved to Kent early last year. Why the General? Because Porter wanted to outrank "the Colonel." His food certainly does.

Willie Turner owns Beacon Hill's Willie's Taste of Soul with his wife, Brenda. Willie is a master of barbecuing bird. Also from Louisiana, he cooked for both R & L and the General before opening his own place in 1994. Locals flock to him at the holidays to have him smoke hams and turkeys. "Put quality time into it," Willie says. "Season your bird right, then cook it slow over alderwood. Slow cooking drives the seasoning deep into the meat."

ALL OF THESE places are deserving local barbecue stars. Other pits, like Woodinville's Armadillo, Dixie's in Bellevue, Greenwood's OK Corral, and giant corporate chain Tony Roma's—which somehow mysteriously end up year after year on lists of top Seattle barbecue joints—are just not.</font>