He left Harvard to follow his pit master dreams. Now he’s making some of the Philly area’s best brisket.

Billows of sweet smoke curled out of the open firebox on the gargantuan smoker at John Parson’s Texas Barbecue. A gentle spring breeze traveling through the parking lot beside this restaurant in Colmar, Pa., cleared it just enough so I could see flames smoldering inside its open mouth, the post oak logs trucked in from Texas wafting a soupçon of vanilla-singed brisket into the air. The mist parted again to reveal a plaque bolted above the steel door etched with a quote: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

The boastful words come from an 1818 poem by the British romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley called “Ozymandias‚” the Greek name for the colossal statue of Pharoah Ramesses II that inspired the verse, and now the name of this giant smoker, referred to currently simply as “Ozy.”

“That might sound a bit too highbrow for barbecue, but it’s an apt name for the largest smoker I know of in this region,” says the restaurant’s chef and owner John Lantonio. He purchased this refurbished 1,000 gallon 1950s propane tank from legendary smoker builder Sunny Moberg after a three-year wait, then towed the 10,000 pound monster back to Pennsylvania from Dripping Springs, Texas, at 45 mph, his Ford pickup fishtailing all the way.

“I managed to anger a tremendous portion of the country over a short portion of days,” he says.

After devouring several platters of Lantonio’s brisket and other smoked meats, I can tell you it was worth it. He cooks it in the Texas style, encrusted simply with coarse ground pepper and salt, and meticulously trimmed into race car-shaped ovals so the smoker’s even heat flows aerodynamically around its curves over the course of 16 hours. A fresh-cut slice of brisket glistens with molten fat, and melts on my tongue. The post oak’s distinctively sweet smoke is deep, but lands more like velvet than a hammer.

There’s a sweet and tangy barbecue sauce available if you’re so inclined. But you don’t need it. The meat does all the talking. You just need to arrive early and stand in line. A local influencer’s recent review on TikTok landed between my own visits and tripled the demand, boosting the lines that queue up by opening time at 11 a.m. and remain until meats sell out by early afternoon.

“Oh my God, no! ... They’re out of ribs!” said a lady in the 30-minute line behind me as Lantonio’s nephew, Dominic Lantonio, placed “sold out!” magnets across several items on the menu board at 12:30 p.m. one recent Saturday just as I stepped up to the order window.

Did I feel guilty securing the final half-rack of spare ribs for the day? Definitely not. I got up early and drove more than an hour north from Center City for the privilege of stripping that bone of tender pork sluiced with a garlicky-sweet vinegar glaze. It was an extreme but necessary measure given that Lantonio has stopped picking up the phone for preorders since that TikTok review, focusing now on walk-ins only.

That’s not bad for a guy who’d previously planned a quiet career as an English professor. Lantonio, 55, launched the first phase of his barbecue life in 2018 with a smaller off-set rig called “Bubba” at a roadside stand in Skippack. He’d taken on the smoky sobriquet of John Parson (“because it sounded like a country farmer”) as a weekend endeavor to help finance his studies at Harvard’s Extension School as an undergrad, then as a graduate student in English. Parson is the name by which he’s known to most of his customers now. And by 2023, Lantonio, who’d already left one backbreaking 20-year career in construction for academia, decided to abandon his master’s degree altogether to pursue his true passion in the pit.

“When you wake up in the morning already thinking about doing that thing you love you’ve got to follow it,” he said. “I’ve found barbecue to be a visceral extension of poetry, and my poetry now takes the physical form of food. Every time I create a platter for someone and see them eating it in the dining room, their eyes roll back as they swoon and that’s a fantastic feeling.”

It’s been a common sight since Lantonio opened his brick-and-mortar version of John Parson’s in Colmar a year ago. As word spread, the lines snaking through the 28-seat dining room of this former gun shop now outfitted with Johnny Cash concert posters, vintage Coke signs, pig statues, and a life-size fiberglass bull have grown to the point that he closed down the Skippack location recently to consolidate all his smoking resources in one place. That mobile kitchen is now parked in Colmar right beside Ozy, and will begin this week serving barbecue breakfast sandwiches on waffles, biscuits, and burritos to keep the line-waiting faithful from getting hangry.

Lantonio is a native of Cherry Hill, not Texas, but after hiring a consultant who’d worked at the legendary Franklin Barbecue in Austin to jumpstart his education, he began making three trips a year to Texas Hill Country to learn the secrets of other pit masters and learn to judge the doneness of a perfectly cooked brisket by touch.

“Brisket is the center of everything and it’s very finicky. When it’s wrong it’s ruined.”

I’ve had more heavily peppered briskets than Lantonio’s, but the luxuriously yielding texture, sustained moistness, and deep-yet-subtle flavor of his prime-grade beef make it an essential anchor for any platter. It has a slow-coaxed savor that most of the industrial gas- or electric-powered smokers boosted with wood pellets and steam in our area cannot match. Considering the fact that so many other barbecue places have fizzled due to the lack of a sustainable audience in our region’s barbecue culture, it’s helpful to note that John Parson’s temptations go beyond brisket. The other meats are outstanding, too.

The ribs are among my favorites. But there is also a superbly tender and juicy pulled pork that gets doused with sweet vinegar glaze, perfect with an extra tangy squirt of the vinegar or mustard sauces. There are pork steaks sliced off the butt before roasting that cook a little faster and get basted in a vinegar steeped with peaches and hot peppers. Pork belly, a relatively new item, is tender, meaty, and creamy from three hours of being basted in its own smoke-rendered drippings. Another version of the belly gets cured into bacon, cubed and candied in the smoker in a glaze of barbecue sauce and maple syrup.

Parson’s poultry options are also stellar — an admirably moist turkey breast piled high on a soft roll for a sandwich with raw red onions, coleslaw, and pickles, the white meat version of the saucy chopped brisket sandwich that’s also worth ordering. The restaurant’s five-pound chickens come by the half off the smoker so plump and well-spiced with a cuminy paprika rub, we took much of ours home and turned the leftovers into a memorable pot pie.

There’s lots of trim involved in barbecue butchered properly on-site. The benefit is a compelling sausage program at John Parson’s, where charcuterie queen Stephanie Carr turns out 120 pounds of sausage a day stuffed with cheddar and jalapeños blended into the trim of pork spare ribs (my favorite) and the popular Philly cheesesteak links made from ground brisket that turn firm and snappy in the smoker, with oozy pockets of Cooper Sharp inside.

John Parson’s has all the usual sides — creamy mac and cheese, molasses baked beans studded with chopped brisket ends, coleslaw, potato salad, and skillet-crisped corn bread. They’re all solid renditions of standards, like the small assortment of desserts, including a Texas sheet cake brownie topped with pecans and a somewhat irresistible banana pudding. But they are unremarkable compared to the meats. I feel the same way about the sauces, which seem obligatory rather than essential.

Such extras offer room for improvement where Lantonio can begin to provide his restaurant with a more distinctive identity than simply being the rarity of a serious barbecue pit in a region that lacks much competition. Even the meats, as well the creative specials, have yet another level of flavor depth to achieve as Lantonio spends more time at Ozy’s smoky steel gates, hand-gauging the briskets with a gentle squeeze and continually refining the rhythm and verses of his barbecue poetry.

Maybe someday. For the moment, as I left him and his chief cutter Dani “Danielle” Smeykal madly slicing meat for platters behind the glass counter as a hungry line still wound nearly to the front door at 1:30 p.m. on a Saturday, it’s clear Lantonio and his cheerful team are still just trying to keep up.

“After three hours of that your body starts to hurt,” says Lantonio. “But the adrenaline carries you through.”

The steady buzz is so satisfying he’s begun waking up an hour earlier than usual, at 1:30 a.m., to coax the smoker’s perpetually glowing coals back into a crackling fire with enough lead time to meet his growing demand. The personal transformation from Ivy League academic to suburban pit master now known to his customers by another name, it seems, is complete.

“John Lantonio really doesn’t exist anymore because I don’t have a life outside of barbecue,” he says. “There is no other personality other now than John Parson’s. Do I find it fulfilling? Tremendously so.”

808 Bethlehem Pike, Colmar, Pa. 18915, 610-289-0223; bbq-parsons.com

Open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. until sellout (usually early afternoon)

Sandwiches, $12-$16; meats by the pound, $14-$36 (for brisket); BBQ platters, $20 to $75, for a “Family Meal” that feeds four to six.

Wheelchair accessible.

BYOB.

Menu Highlights: Brisket; spare ribs; jalapeño-cheddar sausages; pulled pork; pork belly; candied bacon cubes; half-chicken; smoked turkey; chopped brisket sandwich; banana pudding.