ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I had a barbecue moment, perhaps even a small epiphany. I sat down to a sandwich of toasted white bread, chopped pork, barbecue sauce and slaw. The pork was lean, with a rumor of clean wood smoke, and tender save the defiant chew of black surface meat. The sauce was glossy and predictable, but I didn't care. With the crisp toast, the creamy slaw and that pork, I was seeing stars.

I wrote about this sandwich, at Pig-N-Chik restaurant, and then watched the mail come in. Some people went and loved the barbecue. Some hated it. Many told me I didn't know anything about this greatest gift of Southern cooking. (A few even invoked a metaphor involving a hole in the ground that, in the context of smoking pits, seemed wholly appropriate.)

I was vilified on Web sites devoted to all things 'cue, and repeatedly encouraged to drive to various smoked-meat meccas around the city of Atlanta, greater Atlanta, nowheres-near-Atlanta, the Carolinas, Alabama and East Jesus if I really, really wanted to try primo pig.

What could I do? I drove. I visited all the old-timey joints, praised by some and disparaged by others, that I had been meaning to get to. I tried the newer, next-gen places, where ribs are served amidst high relief retro cool. I dined in big-box corporate behemoths with an open mind. And I day-tripped to famous barbecue temples within reasonable excursion distance.

I did not go anywhere that required crossing state lines or taking out a motel room. I was on a quest, not an odyssey.

I found that despite Atlanta's rep as a barbecue wasteland, there are good -- sometimes very good and very occasionally hubba-hubba great -- choices in every quadrant of our city. We are, after all, right in the heart of pork barbecue country.

What Atlanta lacks is a local style. When we visit a new barbecue place, we don't know if the sauce will be thin and vinegary or shiny with ketchup. You don't know if the hot sauce will be cloy with corn syrup or if the mild sauce will burn with red pepper.

We don't know if the ribs will make our lips tingle with spice, if the meat will slip from the bone or clutch it as tenaciously as Martha Stewart to her alibi. We don't know if the pork will be pulled into shreds and minced or separated into chunks and chopped.

Yet as a population center, Atlanta attracts pit masters from throughout the South. And the best ones invariably tell you where they came from -- be it Tennessee or South Georgia -- and why their barbecue tastes the way it does. Tradition plays as big a role as technique.

There is also a difference between black barbecue and white barbecue, with plenty of examples of both in Atlanta. In African-American barbecue places, ribs are the thing. They are never boiled first but slowly cooked over charcoal or wood, then cut into short-, center- and long-end portions. The barbecue sauce tends to have more of a caramel undertone of molasses, and the sides are often home-style veggies. White barbecue places in this part of the South generally tout their chopped pork. The sauce is usually sharpened with a notable splash of distilled or cider vinegar, and the side dishes always include baked beans and Brunswick stew.

One final note: Being a big, busy city, Atlanta doesn't play the rules of great barbecue. We expect restaurants to post their hours, take credit cards and serve consistent plates of pork whenever we feel like eating them. We don't easily abide places that serve the meat when it's smoked, mopped and ready to go, then close up shop when it sells out. Sometimes we have our urban ways to blame when we claim the barbecue eaten at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon is dry and lifeless.

Here are notes from 15 barbecue restaurants that came highly recommended from readers, other publications and Internet message board posters, with my highly subjective impressions of each. I sampled the ribs and the chopped pork whenever possible, and rated them on a 1-to-5 star rating. If I found the chicken, beef, Brunswick stew, fried pies or sawdust floors worthy of note, they were noted.

One of the best tips came from Hillary Brown, who writes the "Grub Notes" column for Flagpole Magazine in Athens. Hometown Bar-B-Que is a small catering truck that parks on Fridays and Saturdays at a parking lot in Lawrenceville. The ribs have a tingly spice rub, are pink to the bone and are redolent with the cleanest, purest wood smoke smell imaginable. The chopped pork is lean and tender, with that same pretty smell. I'm very grateful to Hillary and her mother, Atlanta dining doyenne Christiane Lauterbach, for sharing their find.

Another came from a poster on eGullet.com, which persuaded me to try Ashby Street Rib Shack, an amazing place to get a short-end cut of chewy, smoky ribs wrapped between two pieces of white bread. These are bones you want to gnaw clean.

Dean's Barbeque in Jonesboro has been serving the same amazing pork sandwich since 1947, and it has only taken this bozo dining critic six years to discover it. It's the gold standard.

Wallace Barbecue in Austell has been highly recommended by many publications over the years, including this paper. Again, I'm new to it. Both the ribs, which are so rendered of their fat as to be almost candied, and the chopped pork, tender and fragrant with clean smoke, are great. But my favorite thing to do at Wallace is to spike the Brunswick stew with a shot of the house hot mustard sauce then swipe the freshly fried, skin-on potatoes through it.

And -- when all is said, done, rubbed, mopped, chopped, pulled, eaten and digested -- I still love Pig-N-Chik. You got a problem with that?