The customers at Sun Kwai Heung are not bashful, confidently striding into the white and pink tiled shop, knowing that dawdling might mean missing out. Even the shuffling elderly women make no pretense, sternly shoving containers brought from home through the metal bars that wrap the front counter. They also have no issue with shoving ponderous—and puzzled—reporters out of their way.

Those bars aren’t meant to keep people at bay, but to keep the shop’s offerings front and center. Owner Chan Wai and his clerk match their customers’ no-­nonsense efficiency, quickly hoisting slabs of char siu—the thickly lacquered, sweet-and-savory barbecued pork for which they’ve been famous more than half a century—down from the bars and onto wooden boards, hacking off slices to weigh on a balance scale held aloft by the clerk.

Char siu is a serious—and seriously early—affair in Hong Kong. The multistep cooking process begins long before dawn, producing about 275 pounds a day. By lunch, it will be gone, mostly taken home, some consumed at the shop’s handful of tables—thin strips of fatty-juicy pork mounded over rice that sops the syrupy glaze drenching the meat.

I’d come to Hong Kong on the promise of having some of the best barbecue of my life. Something I’ve heard many times in many places. But Sun Kwai Heung did not disappoint. The pork—always shoulder—is cooked in thick slabs over live fire until charred just at the edges, while staying not quite fall apart tender at the center, all of it soaked in a sauce that marries potently harmonious notes of sweet richness.

To see how it is made, I ventured to the back of the shop, where an equally small room is dominated by a torpedo-shaped upright gas-fired cooker with a door that swings wide. The cook, Kwok Siu Ming, explained the process as he moved massive racks of those juicy slabs—each suspended by a stainless steel hook—in and out of the cooker.

The pork slabs first are rubbed with a seasoning paste made from ample sugar, salt, black pepper, ginger, garlic, honey, shallots and cinnamon, all tossed together in a deep bucket. And that’s where it would stay for at least 30 minutes, though often longer. The roasted ducks and suckling pigs Kwok also must tend to easily distract him.

Each slab of pork—usually a foot long, 2 inches wide and 2 inches thick—then was jammed onto those hooks and, a few at a time, suspended above the flames in that torpedo, the whole process bathing Kwok and the dark room in an orange glow. Just 30 minutes at 400°F is good to start.

Meanwhile, he prepared a glaze built from a simmered down pot of many of the same ingredients, but with a few additions, including five-spice powder and a bit of oil. The result was thick and sticky and impressively aromatic. I dunked my finger—and stupidly burned myself, but it was worth it. Shockingly sweet and savory and everything you’d want in a barbecue sauce. This was slathered onto the pork, which was then returned to the oven, a cycle that repeats until the meat glistens.

Back in the front room, I was offered a plate of the pork, now sliced with the sauce pooling around it. With chopsticks, I hoisted a chunk to my mouth. I can think of all manner of inappropriate ways to describe how good it was. That’s how good it was. Understand this: The flavor was that of the best Chinese takeout crossed with the best Southern barbecue.

Which is to say, it was good enough that next time I may not let the elderly ladies push me out of the way.