Where Meat Is King

Joe Carroll has some very specific ideas about how to run a restaurant.“I didn’t want to have cutlery of any sort here,” he said recently, sitting in his barbecue restaurant, Fette Sau, which opened last month in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “Barbecue is something you eat with your hands, like hamburgers or pizza. I reluctantly brought in some really terrible plastic cutlery because I thought people wouldn’t like it, so they’d just use their hands. But it didn’t work — people are stubbornly using those plastic knives and forks. Now I think we’re actually going to have to get metal cutlery.”If Mr. Carroll’s preferred utensil protocol hasn’t quite worked out, that’s about the only thing he has to be unhappy about at Fette Sau, which is German for “fat pig.” Lines have been out the door for the restaurant’s smoky, spicy meat, and the foodie community is buzzing about the place. Mr. Carroll has achieved this largely by doing things his way, even if that clashes with people’s expectations.Take, for example, the side dishes — or, rather, the lack of them. Most barbecue places around town offer a lengthy roster of collard greens, macaroni and cheese, green beans, hush puppies, fries, and so on. Fette Sau has just baked beans, potato salad, and broccoli salad.“Serving lots of sides is more of a city barbecue thing,” Mr. Carroll said. (Along with his wife, Kim, he also owns the popular beer and wine bar Spuyten Duyvil, across the street from Fette Sau). “Country barbecue is more like, ‘I’m making some meat, and there are some potato chips for sale over there.’ That’s closer to what we were shooting for. This place is about smoked meat. Doing a lot of sides would just get in the way.”The meat at Fette Sau defies barbecue convention, too. There’s the usual assortment of pork ribs, pulled pork shoulder, and brisket. But there are also meats you don’t see at most barbecue places, including flank steak, leg of lamb, pastrami, and pork belly (essentially uncured bacon, with all the fatty richness that implies).“There’s no ‘New York style’ of barbecue, and we’re not from the South,” Mr. Carroll, who grew up in New Jersey, said. “That allows us to chisel out our own idea of what barbecue can be, instead of matching people’s expectations of what they think it’s supposed to be.”The best example of that is the restaurant’s most unusual item: smoked pigs’ tails, which landed on the menu by accident. “Before we opened, we were experimenting with the smoker, and we were just using meat from the local CTown,” Mr. Carroll explained. “They have a big Hispanic clientele, and they had these big trays of pig tails. I thought, Why not? So it was sort of an impulse buy, but it came out great.” Indeed, the tails are no novelty item. Crisp on the outside, juicy inside, they’re just meaty enough to make an irresistible snack, like a porky version of chicken wings. And, no doubt to Mr. Carroll’s delight, there’s no way to eat them except with your hands.Like most of the other meats at Fette Sau, the pigs’ tails are treated with a dry rub consisting primarily of salt, pepper, ground espresso beans, and brown sugar (“Coffee and sugar go well together,” notes Mr. Carroll). Sauces are available on the side as a grudging nod to convention. Mr. Carroll has even less affection for sauces than he does for silverware. “I’ve always thought that if barbecue’s done right, it doesn’t need the sauce,” he said. “It’s about the flavor of the meat and the smoke and the fat and the spices.”This devotion to doing barbecue on his own terms led Mr. Carroll to make an unusual choice for his head chef, Matt Lang, who had no barbecue experience and had previously run the kitchen at the Pearl Oyster Bar.“I wanted someone who didn’t have any predisposed notions of what barbecue should be,” Mr Carroll explained. “I made a con certed effort not to hire someone from the Carolinas or Texas or someplace like that. Matt’s from Baltimore, which doesn’t have a strong barbecue culture, so that’s perfect.”Mr. Lang, who ate plenty of smoked meat while attending col lege in Virginia, has been game for the challenge. “I’m still learning how the smoker behaves,” he said referring to the restaurant’s Southern Pride cooker, which is fired primarily with oak logs. “But almost everything we’ve tried has worked out. I’m surprised by how well it’s gone, frankly.” The smoker can theoretically handle 700 pounds of meat at a time, though the irregular shapes of the various cuts make it impossible to pack it tightly enough to reach that figure more realistic is between 400 and 500 pounds.Fette Sau’s idiosyncratic ap proach extends to the bar, which Mr. Carroll has stocked with a broad array of high-end bourbons ryes, and specialty beers. The tap handles are knives, a meat tender izer, and a ball-peen hammer which makes for a striking display “It’s about celebrating good Amer ican things,” Mr. Carroll said. “We have no liquor of any sort that’s not from North America. No Russian vodka, the rum is from either the United States or Puerto Rico. And of course we have tequila from Mexico.”The one consistent gripe about Fette Sau so far is that it sometimes runs out of meat well before closing time — a common problem in the barbecue world, where the meat can take more than a dozen hours to cook. “We can’t make more on the spot,” Mr. Carroll said “Obviously, we don’t want to run out, but we also don’t want to make too much, because it isn’t as good the next day. We’re still learning about the level of customer demand.”And what else has he learned? He thought for a moment, and then said ruefully, “I’ve learned that most people in New York like to use utensils.”

Where Meat Is King

Where Meat Is King

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