Calvin Trillin once compared eating ribs cooked by white people to going to a non-Jewish internist: "It’s not wrong on the face of it, but it shows poor attention to the percentages." This week we sample two rib joints run by white people and one run by Latinos. Despite the percentages, it’s still not wrong on the face of it, and we were in the right most of the time.

To start with the most unusual, BBQ Town is in a Latino section of Roslindale between Forest Hills and Roslindale Square, but has a fully multicultural menu and clientele. It is in some ways the most suitable-looking joint of the three. The wood floors, chairs, and tables (all seven of them in a large room) are beat to heck. The paneling on the wall is painted to look like distressed knotty pine, but is actually fairly distressed on its own. The atmosphere is entirely mellow, however, with families and babies and teenage groups ordering and eating or taking out in a relaxed way.

The décor includes real cacti, quasi-Navajo paintings, US presidents one through 18 in small portraits, photos from TV and movie Westerns, news photos of black sailors and soldiers from World War II, a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., and, well ... you name it.

The menu has fried fish and chicken, pasta, pizzas, a Greek chicken wrap, salads, and standard barbecue items, cheap. A rib dinner ($8.95) is a big quarter-rack of pork ribs, with some smoke and average barbecue sauce. The cornbread is a little sweet, but side dishes include such Latin specialties as tostones (twice-fried plantains) and rice and beans. The former are a pretty good job, especially when you add a little hot sauce. The latter feature good, juicy yellow rice, but rather bland black beans. Soul-food side orders such as collard greens and green beans were exactly as we expected them, overdone and a little salty and sour. Macaroni and cheese is chrome-yellow and just as starchy-rich as anyone could want. Candied sweet potatoes are extremely sweet. Beef ribs ($8.95) held a little more smoke than the pork ribs.

The fisherman’s platter ($13.95) was a fine assortment of fried haddock, a few shrimp ($10.95/platter), calamari, a few scallops, and rather good French fries. A pulled-pork sandwich ($6.25) was nice and juicy, probably the most authentic bit of barbecue, as Carolina pulled pork isn’t very smoky in its classic form.

BBQ Town has desserts, of which the bread pudding ($2.35) with caramel sauce is both the most traditional and the best. Boston cream pie ($2.25) was surprisingly good, as was a slice of chocolate cake ($2.25). The cheesecake ($2.25) was a thin slice, but who can eat cheesecake on top of barbecue?

I stopped in at the Village Smokehouse — which I first reviewed in 1987, when it opened — because another publication declared that it had the best ribs in Boston. I seriously doubted this; when I reviewed it, the ribs weren’t smoked at all, but precooked and then finished on an open grill so the sauce would burn on. That’s about the definition of white-boy ribs, and while I never refuse spareribs, it’s the least-authentic and least-effective style, to my taste.

It’s also an extremely popular style. When I arrived on a weekday evening, there was a 25-minute wait for a seat. I could see that the open grill was still being used in the same awful way, so I settled for a take-out order of the largest assortment, "The Texas Hawg" ($19.95). This delivered a large beef rib (individually $15.95, or $17.95/"Texas size"), a good pile of baby-back ribs ($17.95/$19.95), some beef brisket ($12.95), a leg quarter of barbecue chicken ($13.95), and most of a Texas sausage ($8.95). The latter is an oversize and somewhat garlicky Italian sausage, and best suited for the grill-burn technique. The beef rib holds the most smoke, as usual, but still not much. The chicken was decent, and the spareribs a little better than decent. For sides, the beans are too sweet and the slaw is a little too limp.

There are desserts, bar appetizers, steaks, fish, fajitas, and actual beer at the Village Smokehouse, but I still can’t endorse naming a restaurant "smokehouse" and serving unsmoked ’cue. The atmosphere certainly is nice: country music, Texas souvenirs, a branding iron, black tin ceiling, cowboy pictures. Somebody could buy this and turn it into a pretty good rib joint, if it weren’t already doing such good business.

(A great many African-Americans in Boston, whose ancestors migrated from North Carolina, don’t smoke barbecue much, either, but they would never burn on the sauce. Even where ribs are just baked, as at Simco’s, the sauce isn’t burnt. And African-American barbecue chefs at Pit Stop and M&M, who use slow fire, may baste a little, but mostly sauce after cooking. The exception is Kenton Jacobs of Jake’s Boss, who has always used a Texas-style smoker to fine effect.)

Today, white people, Northerners often, are seriously studying Southern barbecue styles, and that’s why we have such fine ribs at places like Redbones, East Coast Grill, Rouge, Uncle Pete’s, and so on. As can happen in food history, the barbecue revivalists sometimes have the over-enthusiasm of converts, using too much smoke, overly hot sauces, and actual china busts of Elvis as decoration.

These are really my only criticisms of Blue-Ribbon Bar-B-Q, located in corners of West Newton and Arlington. Each location is lovingly and beautifully decorated with old license plates, soda slogans, food-market signs, yellow-and-green walls, bar stools, metal tables, and such. The background music is blues.

In Arlington, which even has sidewalk dining, I settled in for an early dinner of a "North Carolina pulled pork" sandwich ($5.95) on site and a trio barbecue combo ($12.95) to take home for further analysis. The pulled pork was delicious, but completely inauthentic and much too smoky. I think there are some Memphis smoked-pork dishes of this intensity. I liked it even better with the sprightly "NC Vinegar," one of seven choices in giant bottles and jars.

On the combo, the brisket ($8.95/solo platter) was mostly exquisite; some pieces were a little dry, but all were very smoky. Brisket is the ideal meat for smoked barbecue, unless it’s beef short ribs. The regular barbecue sauce is a little hotter than regular; the hot is a little hotter than that, but very tasty; the sweet is pretty sweet; and the gold is an intriguing hot-sweet that must involve mustard but has an undertone like celery.

The jerk chicken ($8.95) was very nicely made, with a little smoke and done just right, but the seasoning, while hot enough, lacked the prominent allspice flavor I associate with jerk. Likewise the "Memphis dry-rubbed" ribs ($10.95); these were excellent ribs with some smoke, but no evident crust of dry rub. Blue-Ribbon has the tastiest yellow cornbread on this tour, and its beans, although slightly chewy, were quite good. The side of rice and beans had mediocre rice, but excellent fat, large beans, like Peruvian ones. The side that I loved most is a current special on beet salad — less pickled than many, with just enough fresh parsley to cut the texture.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.