Fette Sau, a Brooklyn Barbecue Pioneer, Is Calling It Quits

When Brooklyn barbecue mainstay Fette Sau opened in a former auto garage in 2007, it drew immediate crowds: Customers in skinny jeans and thick-rimmed glasses lined up along Metropolitan Avenue for a chance to sit cheek-to-jowl on communal wooden benches and devour juicy pulled pork, sugary ribs, peppery pastrami, and slabs of fat-backed brisket cut to order with a rotating assortment of sides and high-caliber American whiskey. Texas transplants may have grumbled about the prices — $22 per pound for some of the ’cue — but neighbors and food writers loved the place.

“It was still exotic to most Manhattanites. Same thing with the food press, who went apeshit for it,” Foster Kamer, editorial director of Futurism and publisher of the newsletter Fostertalk, says. “There was nothing like it in NYC at the time: incredible, uncompromising, best-in-class BBQ, served in an unsparing way, the product of real BBQ nerdery.”

Owner Joe Carroll’s dedication to serving heritage breeds of meat from small farms in a bare-bones industrial interior was, at the time, the highest form of sophistication, emphasizing authenticity over embellishment. “Everything about the place is telegraphing, This is the thing we care about, we’re going to do it exceptionally well, and nothing else — not your comfort, not the way you like BBQ, not the way you’ll smell leaving the place — matters,” Kamer says.

Fette Sau kept company with other unpretentious, chef-driven standbys such as Diner, Marlow & Sons, Pies ’n’ Thighs, Dumont Burger, and the Roebling Tea Room. In addition to that club, it joined what was at the time a very small number of New York City spots — Sylvia’s, the Harlem soul-food landmark, and Dinosaur Bar-B-Que among them — serving southern-style barbecue at all.

Carroll had been inspired to open it after a Puerto Rican–style pig roast his father took him to one summer inspired him to buy a smoker and go whole hog on his own. “This was the greatest meat I ever had in my life,” he says. “They roasted the whole hog on a spit and shredded it. It was incredible.”

Carroll occasionally roasted a pig on holidays for friends and staff at Spuyten Duyvil, the laid-back Belgian beer bar he opened with his then-partner, Kim Carroll, in 2003. But serving barbecue to the public didn’t occur to him until a friend, Oslo Coffee owner JD Merget, tipped him off to a defunct auto garage that hit the market in 2006. Carroll and his partner signed a lease for $4,200 per month, named the place Fette Sau — “Fat Pig” in German — and opened the following spring.

“When I told my landlords what I wanted to do, they said, ‘Are you crazy?’ But it seemed like the perfect spot for me,” Carroll says. “I knew I could do a beer bar, but I lied to myself and my staff that we were opening a bar that would do some barbecue. I had no idea how to run a restaurant.”

He figured it out, but the city’s barbecue scene soon exploded — Mable’s Smokehouse arrived on Berry Street in Williamsburg in 2011; Mighty Quinn’s, which started as a stall at Williamsburg’s Smorgasburg, established its first brick-and-mortar store in the East Village in 2012; Hometown Bar-B-Que arrived in a 4,500-square-foot restaurant in Red Hook a year later — while Williamsburg’s demographics kept getting wealthier. Now, after nearly two decades in business, Carroll is extinguishing Fette Sau’s fire. “We could have never imagined the success and support we found here on Metropolitan Avenue. It is with heavy hearts and full stomachs that we say goodbye, for now. Thank you for your immense generosity and loyalty over the years,” the restaurant posted on Instagram. Fans have until December 21 to pile up their last mounds of heritage pork belly and sides of broccoli salad (or they can head to Philly, where the Fette Sau that Carroll owns with Stephen Starr is staying open).

So what’s happening? Are they being forced out to make way for a condo? Blank Street had a better offer on the space? Instead, changing tastes are to blame: Carroll, who also runs St. Anselm down the street, says business just dropped off after the pandemic and he calculated he would run a deficit if the restaurant continued operating through the winter. It doesn’t help that his rent quadrupled over time to $16,500 per month. “The numbers dropped so quickly this fall I thought, This is starting to cost me money, and I didn’t want to throw good money at bad money,” he said. “Honestly, the business just wasn’t there.”

Carroll posits that the city’s new crop of 25-year-olds are eating less meat and drinking less, and he hasn’t seen many of Williamsburg’s newer residents these days. “The people who moved to Williamsburg go out less and spend less money at bars and restaurants,” Carroll said. “All the people I avoided by living downtown and in Brooklyn now live in my neighborhood. Now the people going out here are a bridge-and-tunnel crowd.” The place with lines down the block now is L’industrie Pizzeria, a slice shop famous for its burrata pizza that’s consistently rated among the city’s best.

Chelsea gallery owner Miles McEnery, whose staff said Fette Sau was one of his favorite restaurants, was in disbelief. “NO! Please say it ain’t so. Thank you for being so damn good to us for all these years. So many special moments shared and lingering memories. The stuff of life. You will be missed. The bbq and vibes were always immaculate. Will absolutely stop in prior to the 21st for one last hurrah,” the gallery’s official account posted hours after wrapping up at Art Basel in Miami.

Carroll knows his customers are disappointed, but he has ruled out opening another Fette Sau in the near future. Instead, he is working to open a third branch of St. Anselm — the second location is in Washington, D.C. — in Nashville by 2027. Steak, after all, is still selling.