The attraction of barbecue on breezy sun-dappled days like today is enough to draw me to Brooklyn as it did tonight for dinner at the new-this-year Fette Sau in Williamsburg.
Inside a converted garage squeezed between an old apartment building and an auto-body repair shop, the place is decorated like a New Yorker’s idea of an Alabama shotgun shack. The smoker is visible in the back, and seating is a half dozen large, heavy lacquered picnic tables inside and out. The strangest touch is a widescreen television mounted inside a mock hardwood-framed fireplace that loops a video of a crackling fire.
You line up and order your meats and sides based on what’s available behind the thick glass counter. The order is plunked, sans plate, directly onto a waxed paper-covered metal tray. Frills are few. “Can I, like, get the pulled pork on a sandwich?” asked the guy in line behind me. “I can give you a dinner roll and you can make your own,” countered the server.
Seats at the bar are old steel tractor seats bolted to posts. Overhead, battered gramophone horns shade Edison bulbs. Setting the aural atmosphere, ancient tin-canned jingles intermingle with po-boy hits by the likes of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Big Mama Thornton and Creedence. Behind the bar, old butcher’s knives serve as handles for the ten beer taps mounted into the white tile wall. In keeping with the coonskin-cap theme, a Fess Parker is one of the only wines available, but the bar’s specialty is bourbon, dozens of varieties, the names and prices chalked on a giant slateboard.
I’m no bourbon expert so I asked the bartender to recommend one. He immediately grabbed a squat, sharply faceted bottle of Blanton’s. “It’s a steal at $10 a glass,” he said, “and it goes good with food,” a description that did not fill me with confidence in his descriptive skills. “It won’t let you down,” he added, as if sensing I thought his recommendation might.
Tasty, and it did go well with my food, a half-rack of spareribs, charred to perfection. I am a rib extremist: if ribs are of the sauced variety, I want them saucier than Jessica Alba in hotpants (and that sauce better be tasty, not reminiscent of Spaghetti-O’s). If they are of the charred, dry rub variety, I want them not only spicy but blackened like satan’s hooves. Which these were. Spicy and savory though the portion was miniscule for $11. I had a side of beans, too, ladled in a food service cup but rich with chunks of pork and spicy. In keeping with the German name of the place (which means “fat pig”) other sides include potato salad, sauerkraut and, though technically Russo-Jewish, Guss’ famous Half-Sour kosher pickles.
Fette Sau
- 354 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn (between Roebling and Havemeyer Streets)
- (718) 963-3404
- Meal 17 of 52: half-rack of spareribs ($11), beans ($5) and a bourbon ($10).