AWLING, N.Y.
BARBECUE happens. One minute you're driving down Route 22 in Dutchess County, and suddenly, as fast as you can say western Tennessee, there's the scent of hickory smoke in the air and a truck on the side of the road with a picture of a smiling red pig holding an oversized fork.

This is Big W's Roadside Bar-B-Q, which appeared on a little bit of roadside lawn in front of Pawling Collision earlier this summer. The pork ribs served there are about the best I've ever had within 90 miles of New York City.

Big W is Warren Norstein, 39, and it would be a nice romantic thing to tell you that he learned the fine art of smoking meat from his daddy in Memphis, who in turn learned it from his father. But this is not the case. Mr. Norstein said he is simply "a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn."

He spent 10 years cooking in serious New York kitchens of restaurants like Bouley and Chanterelle. Last year, he moved to Pawling. The plan was, he said, he would open a restaurant with a former Chanterelle colleague who lived in the area. But when the financing for that restaurant fell through, the plan changed.

Mr. Norstein's path to barbecue solvency began with the purchase of a mobile commissary kitchen in Arkansas that he had seen on eBay and, soon after, the purchase of a large, oblong smoker for his ribs. He experimented a while. Mr. Norstein cooks his ribs over hickory logs, now putting upward of 40 racks of them over the smoke for a minimum of eight hours at 210 degrees. He is open every Wednesday through Sunday from 4 p.m. until he sells his last rib. The business day can be as short as one hour.

For his ribs, Mr. Norstein uses a dry rub of brown sugar, garlic salt, granulated onion, cumin, paprika and chili powder. The results are juicy and very smoky, with a gorgeous brownish black caramelized exterior. Mr. Norstein's sauce, made with apricots, black vinegar and red pepper, is perfectly fine but absolutely unnecessary. A rack of ribs (easily enough for two people) costs $20 and comes with three side dishes. On which subject, skip the mushy potatoes, which practically disintegrate in the smoker, and opt instead for straightforward cole slaw and the delicious beans, which have plenty of meat shards in them.

The only other item Norstein serves is some Double Elephant Thai rice with caramelized onions that he also makes in the smoker. Thai rice at a roadside barbecue? You can take the man out of Bouley, but evidently you can't take Bouley out of the man.