Let’s have the pig’s head and the steamed buns tonight, Dad,” my 10-year-old daughter said merrily as we sat down for our second, or maybe third, meal at Zak Pelaccio’s inspired little fusion-barbecue joint, Fatty ’Cue, in Williamsburg. Restaurant critics don’t drag their families around on their gastronomic rounds, as a rule. Especially over crowded bridges, through miles of rush-hour traffic, in the dog days of July. But this wasn’t work, really. We were back by popular demand, sitting upstairs in the quirky warren of rooms that Pelaccio has converted into one of the great destinations of this year’s barbecue season. Next to us, just under the ceiling, was a gently twirling Styrofoam pig covered in sparkles. The mingled smells of wood smoke, sizzling pork fat, and burnt sugar wafted in from the smoker outside. My daughter put down her menu and waited, with a smile on her face, for our pig’s head to arrive. “I wish this restaurant was in our neighborhood,” she said.
Pig’s head is a regular special at Fatty ’Cue, but throughout the week, all sorts of strange, unexpected delicacies emerge from the smoker, which is manned by famed New York pit master Robbie Richter, from Rego Park. Richter made his reputation at Hill Country, where he produced an uncanny facsimile of barbecued beef brisket, that Texas specialty. But at Fatty ’Cue, he and Pelaccio (who is a proprietor of the popular Fatty Crab restaurants, in Manhattan) produce a different, more original kind of alchemy. The restaurant’s stated theme is Malaysian barbecue, which means its version of thick-cut, Peter Luger–style bacon ($11) comes to the table sizzled not in more bacon fat, but coriander. And if you ask about the addictive, faintly funky quality of the delicately fatty lamb ribs ($12), your waiter will tell you that the key is in the brine, a mix of white wine and a spicy fermented shrimp paste called cincalok.
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