By Raphael Kadushin

Memphis tour guides like to take visitors around the Four Kings circuit. This marathon whisks past sites associated with the city’s four favorite sons – B.B. King; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Elvis; and King Cotton – through there is a fifth icon that should be added to the itinerary. In a city where everything gets barbecued, right down to the spaghetti, it’s clear what constitutes the reigning culinary monarch.

Few other places celebrate barbecue as exuberantly, especially in May, when the town shuts down for a mammoth barbecue cook-off that throws everything into the pit. The result is a carnivores’ blowout. There probably aren’t many other culinary carnivals where you’d find grilled armadillo, or a pageant of pits dressed up as papier-mâché castles, dragons and windmills. …

Charlie Vergos’ Rendezvous, though, best embodies Memphis’s loyalty to barbecue. Opened in 1948 by Charlie Vergos, the restaurant is a city tradition famous for its pork ribs. These are still cooked in non-stop rotation, in four massive pits at the back of the dining room, so you can see the loin back ribs stacked over hardwood charcoal and sizzling in the juices that drip from rack to rack. Just before being served, the meat is basted with white vinegar and water and sprinkled with a house seasoning (salt, pepper, oregano, chili powder, cayenne, garlic, and then it’s anyone’s guess) that’s flavor enough for most aficionados. The day I sampled a rib plate, few locals were bothering to use the jars of sauce sitting on the tables, though the bowls of mustardy coleslaw and red beans and rice were going fast.

The result was a classic barbecue feast – the fitting last round in my cross-country odyssey. What made the Rendezvous meal feel like the essence of barbecue wasn’t just on my plate. It was also what surrounded me: the walls hung with farm tools, old photos of Memphis, and Elvis memorabilia; the big families filling every table in the sprawling fun house of a dining room, some plowing through a two-slabber meal the equal of about four full orders; and the honeyed accents of waiters who had been stacking up trays of ribs for more than 40 years. “It’s really like a history of Memphis in here,” co-owner John Vergos (Charlie’s son) said. Even a town king, it turned out, recognized the local culinary legacy. “We’ve filled lots of orders for Graceland in our time,” Vergos said as I finished the last rib of my trip and joined some very good company.