Chicago Style Rib Tips

What is a rib tip

Rib tips are the cartilage-heavy strip trimmed off the bottom of a slab of spare ribs when butchers cut them into St. Louis style. For most of the country they get tossed or ground into sausage. On the South Side they get smoked hard, hacked into knuckles, and sold by the slab with white bread, fries, and a pour of mild or hot sauce.

The texture is the whole point. Half meat, half cartilage, chewy in the right way, with bark on every angle because the pieces are small and the smoke gets everywhere.

The aquarium smoker

Walk into Lem's on 75th or any of the old guard South Side spots and you will see a glass-fronted box behind the counter with a fire burning inside it. That is the aquarium smoker. The meat sits on a steel grate above the wood, the glass holds the heat, and the cook works the fire from the front. It is direct heat, not the offset stickburner setup Texas spots use, and it builds a different kind of bark.

Lem's Bar-B-Q and Leon's Bar-B-Q built the template starting in the 1950s. Honey 1, Uncle John's, and a handful of others keep it going. If a place runs an aquarium smoker and has been on the same block for thirty years, you are in the right spot.

Chicago vs Central Texas

Both are BBQ but they share almost nothing. Texas leans brisket, post oak, salt and pepper, sliced thick. Chicago leans rib tips and hot links, hickory, sauce on everything, hacked. One is sit-down with a number ticket. The other is a paper bag through bulletproof glass. If you are after the Texas style, see our best brisket guide.