Brunch at The Meat Hook
Last November, I made reservations for brunch at The Meat Hook in Williamsburg. Yes—a three-month advance booking for a brunch with no menu. (Our Alinea reservations were more spontaneous than this.) What I did know about brunch at The Meat Hook was that you’re continuously served until you don’t finish something, and then it’s over. There’s only one table each week for two people, and me being a loser in that I salivate over anything marked “exclusive,” a reservation was made in November for the first available date… in February.
With three months of life and then the recent excitement of winning Super Bowl tickets (and, later, the crushing realization that we wouldn’t make it to Dallas), I almost forgot about our grand Meat Hook plans. Luckily, my boyfriend is super organized and had made note of it in our shared Google calendar (we’re in a really serious relationship, folks).
At 11:30 on Saturday, Rob and I showed up at The Meat Hook. It’s one half of the Brooklyn Kitchen/Meat Hook pair at 100 Frost Street in Williamsburg. If you’ve never been there, picture a sprawling warehouse space in Williamsburg full of boujie kitchen supplies, like Sur La Table, but in a much less pretentious space. And, yes, my kitchen is full of this boujie shit and I’m not ashamed. In the back is a huge butcher block, separated from the store with a big glass case full of sausages (of the classy and trashy varieties), charcuterie, and other words for meat.
In the middle of the store, in front of this glass case of delicious, butchered livestock, was a butcher block fashioned into a table for two and covered with a red and white tablecloth. Atop it, our placemat: a Terrible Towel (Brent, the absent butcher, is a Steelers fan). PR-girl-turned-bouchère-extraordinaire Sara Bigelow greeted us with two bottles of Brooklyn Brown Ale and we were slowly introduced a lovely group of rockstar butchers who would eventually make us cry.
THIS IS WHERE THE GOOD STUFF STARTS.
For the first course, we were given a small bowl of cinnamon sugar donut pieces with café au lait poured over them. This was accompanied by a minibar bottle of brandy, which we promptly downed. I got more comfortable and whipped out my embarrassing too-big-to-be-casual but too-small-to-be-professional DSLR just in time for the pickle plate, an assortment of pickled green beans, spicy pickles, capers, sauerkraut, and other fermented goodies. Shortly thereafter, we were given a plate of bacon fat focaccia with olive oil and thyme.
Next up was a noodle soup. A fermented, seared pork skin meatball (a Fatty ‘Cue addition, if I heard correctly) in chicken stock and ginger broth with glass noodles, chives, and Sriracha. Delicious. At this point, we were threeish courses in and thinking “This is easy… too easy.”
And that’s when Matt served us a monstrosity of a course. His version of the Double Down, with three big pieces of chicken fried steak, a fried egg, head cheese, and “a piece of lettuce, ’cause, you know, it’s a sandwich.” This was served on a cutting board with a comically large knife. Rob had one taste of the head cheese and decided that he would make me eat it all. I considered cutting him with said knife.
We were determined not to be labeled “little bitches” so early in the meal. Too much meat, grease, and a pound of head cheese later, I wanted to die, but kept on truckin’. Luckily, we were poured glasses of very good whisky (Yamazaki single malt, aged 18 years) to wash it all down.
Then came pork spareribs and braised beef tendon. At this point, we were a few beers and several shots deep, so my terrible descriptions are about to get even worse.
Tom collected the bones and empty bowls and replaced them with pozole, made with boiled pigs head and some other yummy things. I like to think that, at this point, the badass Meat Hook team was impressed with us for pushing through with such fervor, but I was drunk, dying inside, and desperate for approval.
I started on the pozole. “This is part one of the Mexican course,” Tom said. “I’ll be back with part two.”
He came back with this.
This is what they call “Mexican paella”: a local (from the Lobster Pound at Red Hook) lobster the size of my huge head over what seemed like 10 pounds of rice and beans. We got our hands dirtier and dug into the lobster—as full as we were, lobster meat will never be put in front of us in vain—but the rest was too much for us too handle. And thus our meal ended.
Well, kind of. Sara mentioned something about picklebacks, and in a moment of bravado, I shouted out “I could go for one of those!” A minute later, there were two glasses of whisky and two glasses of pickle juice laid out before us. I thought Rob was going to punch me.
When we finally got those down, Tom came out with “bloggerbacks,” our punishment for, obviously, blogging. What’s a bloggerback? “The worst drink I could think of,” he said. “Absinthe, gin, vodka, Texas Pete’s, and some other shit.”
At this point, I actually thought Rob was going to fall over, as he had been drinking beers much more rapidly than I had. But then again, I did down all that head cheese. We thought about pouring the liquid punishment into the potted plant on our table, but all eyes were on us. Eventually, both of us got the shots down, with help from the awesome dish guy John, who was forced to take a whisky shot alongside us to keep us motivated. And although the guys behind the counter mercilessly gave Rob shit for hesitating, I was the one who ended up in the bathroom making pukey noises after brunch.
The damage? $50 (for us both!) and our dignity. And while I’d sooner die than do it again, consider yourself lucky if you got your name down for a table for two over the next few months. The brunch is booked through June and after that, it’s supposedly going on an indefinite hiatus. And if you did manage to secure a spot in front of the sausage case, don’t expect your experience to mirror mine. Every brunch is different. There were no day-old pizza slices, “shitty puppies,” margaratinis for us—that was purely a Zagat-writer experience.
I do guarantee that you will leave drunk and full. And hipster antics aside, the food is very, very good.
