The Rolling Barbecue Revue

Substitute the idea of 'ribs' for 'green eggs and ham,' and I think we're onto something: 'I would eat them in a boat. And I would eat them with a goat. And I will eat them in the rain. And in the dark. And on a train.'

And on a schoolbus, next to a train.

The past year has seen the rise of five mobile barbecue joints around the city and the pioneering endurance of one on the outskirts. It's hardly surprising that the national meat of Texas would become a white-hot piece of the trailer-food boom. The surprise is how some of these low-and-slow rollers are challenging the notion that to have legendary barbecue, you have to have, you know, a legend.

Brett Orrison of the Shed BBQ's Rolling Joint (serving Central Texas since March 2010!) has an opinion about how that works. 'I actually talked with Aaron (Franklin, of Franklin Barbecue) about this. In a trailer, you have a lot less quantity, so every little piece of meat that you're cooking, you're staring at it for 13 hours. You're putting all your mojo, all your love into just a few pieces of meat.'

And I will eat them here and there. Say! I will eat them anywhere!

Franklin Barbecue

3421 N. Interstate 35. 653-1187, www.franklinbarbecue.com. Hours: 11 a.m. until the food runs out (usually around 2 p.m.) Wednesdays-Sundays.

This is possibly the epicenter of the New Barbecue Nerd movement.

A cheeky, retro trailer with plastic patio lanterns? Check. Open just a few hours at a time, with no guarantee that there'll be any meat left by the time you get to the window? Check and check. Run by a young guy with muttonchops and granddad glasses? Absolutely.

The best barbecue you've had in the past year? To quote a well-smoked colleague: 'I think my days of driving to Taylor or Lockhart may be over.'

Franklin Barbecue sprang up as a Christmas present in the parking lot of Owl Tree Roasting in 2009, but Aaron Franklin's overnight success started awhile back.

'When I was kid, my parents had a barbecue place for a few years,' Franklin said. 'My dad ran it, and I talked him into letting me home-school so I could work there when I was about 9 years old.

'Years later, my wife and I bought a little backyard smoker,' Franklin said, accelerating the story from his smoky memories of Bryan to his life in Austin. 'It kind of like rekindled some nostalgia. And that brisket, aahhh, it was so terrible. Kept on working at it, and it was kind of like, "This might be something I might like to do for a career." My other options were pretty nil, really, outside of playing music, and that doesn't pay much.'

So he got a job at barbecue scion John Mueller's short-lived place on Manor Road, then returned to backyard barbecuing and building houses. But fate and the Owl Tree coffee guy intervened.

Franklin had worked with Owl Tree's Travis Kizer at Little City years ago. Kizer asked Franklin to help change out a window, then Franklin stayed on to help with Owl Tree's buildout. 'We were drinking beer one Saturday night out there, and he's like, "Hey, you should finish that camper that's in your backyard and park it back here." ' That's exactly what he did.

Every morning before 11 except Monday and Tuesday, people start milling around outside the gate. At 11:01, the line is a dozen people long. A two-meat plate is $8.75 with two sides, sandwiches around $4.75. There's pulled pork, pork ribs, sausage and thick-crusted brisket. Franklin turns the brisket in his hand and asks me how much fat I'd like. 'All of it,' I say.

What he cuts is a slippery, marbled masterpiece. The muscled beef has just enough give, the fat hovers a few impure thoughts away from rendering. The smoke curls though it like a beach campfire from a 1970s Coke commercial, the crust a reminder of why we started applying heat to meat in the first place.

The other meat is good. Pork ribs with a balance of easy slide and primal chew, sausage that pops with tight-grained texture and fleeting sweetness, pulled pork as proud as ribbons at a county fair. But the brisket. The brisket is epic.

Franklin's not a sauce guy: 'I'm definitely of the camp that it should be good enough without sauce.' Even so, he stocks every picnic table with bottles of the stuff, from hot to sweet to 'pork' and espresso.

The espresso sauce was born of nights staying up tending the fire, taking shots of coffee to stay awake. It's as deep and ruddy brown as a GTO's motor oil, its roasty base an accelerator for the sin and satisfaction of sweet, smoky fat.