the bbq bit...

or, not one for the vegetarians or vegans among you! Consider yourselves forewarned, this is a bit of a homage to eating meat.

so even from blog 1 the bagel bit is pretty obvious, as is brooklyn , but 'bbq'...? I can see the furrowed brows from here... I know you're dying of curiosity!

Apart from the pure pleasure an instance of alliteration can bring, 'bbq' signals both my general interest in all the gastronomic pleasures to be found in this fine city (well the ones I can afford), and invokes the true delights of the bbq meal - as embodied in the most marvelous bbq place we've discovered... fette sau (http://www.fettesaubbq.com/)! mmmmm.

situated in the still-so-hip williamsburg, fette sau is one of those places you wish for in your own home town - we'll miss it when we come home. a bar and an eating joint, on any given night they serve about 6 different kinds of bbqed pork and beef - all organic. you order by weight and type, they slice it up off the slabs kept hot under lights in a glass counter, weigh it, slap it on a paper sheet on a tray, add whatever sides you've ordered (e.g., potato salad), and the complimentary bread buns that appear identical to, and taste as truly bland and awful as, a KFC bun (weirdly out of place among the quality of the meat) and away you go. off to find your seat on the long wooden picnic style tables.

The interior is fantastic - think renovated urban-industrial, illustrated on one wall with cuts of meat, in that old-fashioned butchers chart kind of style. the bar stools are old metal tractor seats; the handles to pull the beers are long knives and meat tenderisers, blades and all. one sees the potential for a nasty accident after one pint too many, but given this is 'the land of the sue', i'm sure all safety angles have been covered. beer is served in jam jars - this isn't 'haute cuisine' here, or silver service. it's warm, loud and social, and a fab night out.

The only downside? unfortunately there is one, but it might be particular to me... so you arrive and join the cue to order, having decided, based on previous experience, that, 'we'll get a 1/2 lb of X and a 1/4 lb of Y, and one side' , which should more than easily fill two people... but then you get to the glass counter, see the options, have a truly libran 'i can't decide and i want to taste it all' moment, and all common sense flies right out the window... you end up ordering a 1/2 lb of this, a 1/4 lb of that, another 1/4 lb of that, two-three sides, and probably more, and before you know it, you've eaten so much you can barely move. there are, of course, worse downsides, and it's nothing that a good hour of walking around williamsburg won't fix, after all. However, this option's not so fun at -6 with the pavements covered in ice. slipping and sliding around williamsburg, complaining of the cold is perhaps a more accurate account.

so there's the bbq...