Lance Rosen has been driving the American South for years, long before the cookbook and the classes that sell out at home. He goes back for the places that don't make the lists — the whole-hog pit on the side of the freeway, the joint in a town you'd have no reason to stop in, the pitmaster who comes out from behind the smoker because you arrived with Lance and not with a map. He has eaten his way across Texas more than once, and he keeps a running ledger of who's worth the detour and which Saturday the brisket runs out. Most people fly into a city, hit three famous joints and call it Texas barbecue. Lance knows the other version, the one that lives in the small towns between the cities.

That's the version he wants to drive. Twelve days out of Dallas, down through Austin and east to Houston before the long road home, eating where the smoke is real and stopping where the road gives a reason. The names that anchor it tell you the rest: a pitmaster in her nineties who fires the pits one morning a week, a family joint two generations deep in a town called Temple, a chef cooking barbecue at a Michelin level who picks up when Lance calls. None of it is a schedule you could build alone.