- [Narrator] Chicago's Italian community had turned a cheap cut of meat to gold.

It was a trick also pulled off by the city's African American community.

- A lot of foods that we consider soul food were foods that we had to make delicious, food that was thrown away.

You know, just enough to keep slaves sustained to be able to work.

A lot of those foods, we made magic out of.

- [Narrator] Black residents who had fled terror in the Jim Crow South brought their food with them, sharing it in the south and west side neighborhoods where they were able to find housing.

- Soul food is sort of the immigrant cuisine, if you will, of southern cuisine.

What you cook in the city when you have to shop in urban markets, you don't have the garden anymore.

You gotta go to the market and see what you can get.

- We all need a little bit of home, wherever we are.

My fondest memories of food is watching my grandmother cook.

My mom was a working mom, and so a lot of her meals were just things that was convenient.

But when Granny came to town, she did not play that.

She made greens, turnip in mustard greens mixed.

Sometimes she put okra in 'em.

And I mean, just the aromas from the house.

For a long time, I couldn't cook soul food.

It was my time at Spiaggia that I was able to start embracing foods that I was familiar with in my culture.

I realized, you know, anything can be made something special.

- [Narrator] Making seemingly ordinary food special is the story of Chicago's signature barbecue dish, the rip tip hot link combo.

- Rip tips was garbage.

It was scrap meat.

A lot of it is cartilage.

- [Narrator] Mississippi barbecue expert Miles Lemons saw potential where many only saw garbage.

Lemons came to Chicago as part of the second great migration in the late 1940s.

Together with his brothers, he opened Lem's, a south side smokehouse specializing in rib tips.

- It's a southern thing.

- [Dominique] They would chop the rib tips right there and cover 'em with sauce.

- He come up with this barbecue sauce he made one day and he let us a little a taste and he said, "Well, that's good."

- And it was something that was sought after in the black communities.

- 20 years ago, 25 years ago, they were throwing rib tips away, but not now.

- [Narrator] And then the Lemons paired them with a homemade smoked pork sausage they called hot links.

- So the tip and link combo was born.

- [Narrator] And it was cooked in a signature Chicago-style smoker.

- [Speaker] What's called an aquarium smoker.

- [Dominique] Chicago's known for it.

- This aquarium style cooking is quicker.

You can do ribs in probably two hours.

- I know it's hot as heck in there, but in Arkansas, that's what we get.

Plenty of heat.

- The aquarium smoker is built with a stack for smoke to push out of the building.

- Cooking in wood is easy with me because that's all we ever done.

- It lights up the area so you can smell barbecue a mile from the restaurant calling your name, whoo, there's barbecue over here.

- [Narrator] But these smokers take special skill and tending.

- They've got the pane glass that they're keeping an eye on everything, but it's cooking over direct heat and they're constantly hosing down the flames.

- It will burn if you walk off and doesn't manage it, it will burn.

- Very dangerous.

Glass explodes, it breaks, it cracks.

- [Dominique] They're also spraying the meat to keep it nice and moist while it cooks.

- Sometimes you just admire the beauty of the fire do you think, yeah, I just cooked this and look at it.

Look how beautiful this sweetie is.

Then you taste into it.

You gotta love.

- [Narrator] The results are all Chicago.

(cook laughs) - That's the way you do it.

- Rib tips are like snowflakes.

No two are the same.

You'll get one and you're like, "Holy Moses, this is so much meat."

And it always got a little bit of, little bone in there, little something, little cartilage.

You gotta work around, go to the next one, you're like, "This one was magical.

It had like, I could eat everything in this one."

- The hot link is a coarse ground sausage.

It's peppery.

You know, the white bread's just there to kind of sop it all up.

It's just a masterpiece of textures and flavors.

(gentle music)