the times' dining section is hitting all the fredeeky favorites...

THE Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, which returns to Madison Square Park this weekend, is an event that invites comparison from pit to pit and encourages discussion on sauce and smoke: there will be seminars for those who prefer their barbecue musings structured.

The block party also affords New Yorkers a chance to compare their local barbecue with some of the best of what the rest of the country has to offer. And those comparisons lead to all sorts of questions about style, about the culinary and cultural hurdles specific to trying to cook and serve barbecue commercially in the big city. They raise the question of how good it is in New York and how good it's going to get, and force the city's barbecue proprietors to answer.

Fortunately, it is no longer debatable whether the real article is being produced in New York City. It is. There are places that do more than just slather on sauce and call what they're serving barbecue. Accomplished chefs are practicing the culinary alchemy that is real pit barbecue, overseeing tremendous amounts of tough meat as it inches toward tenderness in a haze of smoke.

And the population of real barbecue joints has risen markedly since the turn of the century five short years ago, when the city had next to none. In the last year Righteous Urban Barbecue, Smoked, Bone Lick Park, Spanky's and Dinosaur have joined stalwarts like Virgil's, Blue Smoke, Daisy May's and Pearson's.

Some of these restaurants call themselves practitioners of urban barbecue, an undefined style that while having a ready-for-television name, has a meaning that is at best ambiguous. Explaining the urban barbecue he serves at Blue Smoke, where large white letters over the bar proclaim the phrase, the restaurateur Danny Meyer talks about sauces. "We can't out-Memphis Memphis," he said. "But there's not another place with a selection of beers, wines and bourbons - what I like to think of as alcoholic barbecue sauces - like ours anywhere in the country."