THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 17
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
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TABLESFORTWO
Red Hook Tavern
329 Van Brunt St., Brooklyn
You could say that Billy Durney, the man
behind Red Hook Tavern, stumbled into
the restaurant business. Around 2008,
while working as a celebrity bodyguard,
the Brooklyn native began noodling
around with a smoker at home in South
Park Slope, cooking barbecue as a way
to blow off steam. Before long, he was
taking research trips to study under pit
masters in Texas, Illinois, and South
America, painstakingly honing his reci-
pes and techniques. In 2013, he opened
Hometown Bar-B-Que in a converted
garage in Red Hook; it quickly became
one of New York’s most exciting places
to eat, in part because of how unassum-
ing it is, in the grand tradition of Amer-
ican barbecue restaurants. Hometown’s
ragged slices of brisket and hulking beef
ribs, served on wax paper, are as delicious
as they are brutish-looking.
In 2016, Durney announced plans
to open another restaurant, down the
street, this one focussed on fried chicken.
That sounded like a perfect extension
of his obsessive hobbyist cooking. But
he was plagued by construction and
permit problems, and, as time went by,
his idea shifted—the new place would
be a tavern, he said in 2018, something
like Corner Bistro or McSorley’s Ale
House, with a limited menu featuring
fried chicken but also a burger.
The restaurant that Durney finally
opened, this past July, is intended, accord-
ing to its Web site, to “pay tribute to the
classic old school taverns and legendary
food establishments experienced in New
York City,” including Peter Luger Steak
House. That’s a tall order, and Red Hook
Tavern seems to be sagging a bit under
the weight of its concept: it’s not a com-
fortable neighborhood saloon so much
as a strangely stiff paean to one, dripping
with self-consciousness and forced nos-
talgia, evident from the moment you walk
in the door, where a besuited host named
Benny insists on shaking each customer’s
hand and making a formal introduction.
The narrow dining room, in a for-
mer liquor store, is theatrically heavy
on early-twentieth-century-style wood,
exposed brick, and floral wallpaper, and
feels uniquely suited to winter. The menu
also seems designed for colder climes.
In the end, the chicken is not fried but
pan-roasted and served with a moun-
tain of gravy-capped mashed potatoes.
There is a burger, but there’s also a New
York strip steak (with a side of creamed
spinach), a chicken-liver pâté, and a Eu-
ropean-cheese plate. On a steamy night
in August, when produce was peaking,
one of a handful of vegetable dishes was
composed almost entirely of things that
could have come from a root cellar at
Christmastime: fennel roasted in brown
butter, served atop white-bean purée, and
finished with pink peppercorns, pine
nuts, and torn Castelvetrano olives.
Much of the food is admirable, partic-
ularly the burger: dry-aged beef formed
into a patty that’s somehow both precisely
bevel-edged and loosely packed, furnish-
ing optimal juiciness, then layered with
orange American cheese and crunchy raw
white onions in a sesame roll from the
same bakery Peter Luger uses. Mine came
without ketchup and, as a lover of the
condiment, I am loath to admit that this
burger really doesn’t need any; adding it
would be akin to sullying the finest sushi
by dunking it in soy sauce. It’s accompa-
nied by exactly three wedges of deep-
fried potato, which seems stingy at first
and then like an act of tasteful restraint.
But part of the appeal of Corner Bistro
and McSorley’s—not to mention Home-
town Bar-B-Que—is how accessible and
to the point they are. You may not get a
table immediately, but you can count on
high turnover. Red Hook Tavern hasn’t
had time to earn the stature of a place like
Peter Luger, yet you need a reservation
weeks in advance, or to wait for some-
one at the bar to finish a leisurely meal
that might involve tasting pours of cara-
mel-colored macerated wine from Greece
and Georgia. These aren’t bad things,
necessarily—I got notes of Cracker Jack
from the Georgian wine—but there’s
something a little disingenuous about
the place. I’ll take my simple pleasures
in a simpler setting. (Entrées $22-$49.)
—Hannah Goldfield
