Food & Wine picks this classic Milwaukee restaurant as the best barbecue in Wisconsin

When it comes to barbecue, everyone has their favorite spot — and opinions can vary.

Earlier in the week, a West Allis restaurant made a list of the 100 best barbecue spots in the nation. Now, a Milwaukee restaurant has been named the best barbecue restaurant in Wisconsin.

Food & Wine magazine named Speed Queen Bar-B-Q, 1130 W Walnut St., as the state's representative on its Best Barbecue in Every State list.

Speed Queen Bar-B-Q opened in 1956 on North 5th Street and East Vliet Street from the back of a storefront, according to Speed Queen's webpage.

Betty Gillespie and Leonard Partee used a family recipe. They set up shop next to Black King, a well-known barbecue spot. At first, they survived from overflow customers until their food spoke for itself.

Food & Wine's entry about Speed Queen spoke about Milwaukee's history of segregation and the loss of the Black community's traditional gathering places.

"Since the 1950s, on a windswept corner not all that far from downtown, Speed Queen Bar-B-Q has been an unflappable presence on the visible boundary line between two worlds," the entry read, "drawing much of the city for racks of ribs and shards of pork shoulder, pulled from the one-ton smoker."

It also wrote about Gillespie's family carrying on the business after her 2010 death.

More: Gillespie was Speed Queen Bar-B-Q matriarch

"You'll find the pit team pretty much throwing the kitchen sink at the meat, wood-wise — hickory, oak, apple, what have you — and the end result is Wisconsin's finest, most important barbecue."

Speed Queen is the second barbecue spot to put Wisconsin on the map for diners in the last week. Earlier, Double B’s BBQ in West Allis made Yelp's Top 100 Barbecue Spots list.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Food & Wine picks Milwaukee's Speed Queen as Wisconsin's best barbecue