How Sooner Is Now?

Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma, a Dust Bowl refugee tells Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, "Now it means you’re a dirty son-of-abitch. Okie means you’re scum." Much has changed since the Dust Bowl, but as far as barbecue goes, Oklahoma is still seen as being barren as a windswept prairie. So it seems at first glance. Mable’s Smokehouse and Banquet Hall, the newest occupant of 44 Berry Street, a large brick building in Williamsburg that traffics in sleek lofts and homestead rusticity, aims to rehabilitate that state’s barbecue tradition among the bearded barbecue connoisseurs of North Brooklyn.

It’s a tall order. Williamsburg is, by all accounts, a carnivore’s heaven and an animal’s hell. Between Fette Sau, Fatty Cue, Egg, Pies & Thighs and whatever other meat-eating dens that have opened since I scratched these words, it’s hard to believe the market isn’t yet saturated. Hipster cholesterol surely is. But Mable’s is nevertheless a welcome addition. It’s what one calls a meat-and-three, though at Mable’s, perhaps as concession to New York expense, a platter is one meat, two sides and a comforting slice of Wonder Bread. Nevertheless, it’s a place where the elemental forces of barbecue—red plastic trays, hunks of fragrant meat, blocks of mac and cheese—rush together at a confluence: One meat, some veggies, beer. The rest is dross.

Oklahoma, unlike North Carolina, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri, lacks an immediately identifiable barbecue tradition. As Chef Rick Bayless, the Okie-born son of a pitmaster, noted in a 2005 Saveur article about his family’s smokehouse, "Oklahoma barbecue is usually described in terms of what it’s not." The charm of Mable’s is likewise diffuse and best defined through negation.

Mable’s is not Hill Country, the Manhattan send-up of a Central Texas barbecue joint, as vast and rowdy as a Llano roadhouse. There’s a bar at Mable’s for sure, but a serious one, the kind a man saddles up to quietly after a long day, taking Merle Haggard’s "Misery and Gin" to heart and ordering one of Mable’s two gin options (both $7). Go with Farmer’s Organic, not Bombay.

But the biggest difference may be the meat. Hill Country’s brisket is as marbled as a dictator’s bathroom. At Mable’s that sort of excess seems untoward. Instead, the beef brisket here ($9.95 for a sandwich, $14.95 for a platter) is smokier than it is fatty; more austere than it is tender. As befits a Midwesterner, it’s tougher than your average cut. Meanwhile, the pulled pork ($9.95, $14.95) is pillow soft, a bit too sweet and could do with a touch of smoke cut with whiskey; the sweetness and the fire make the perfect yin-yang of the South.

Mable’s is not Egg. The menu isn’t pan-Southern nor super-local. Its owners—husband and wife Jeff Lutonsky and Meghan Love—seem relatively unconcerned with locavorism, although in a nod to the neighborhood, there is a vegan sloppy Joe on the menu. Nor is Mable’s another Pies and Thighs. On the minimal menu, nothing is overtly fried. Mable’s is not ironically Southern nor does it smoke with a wink. The wood paneling is so earnestly adhered to the walls as to confound irony.

Neither is Mable’s Fette Sau. Though she is cavernous and there are stolid wooden communal tables, Mable’s is noticeably less polished. You won’t find fancy stools made of tractor seats or a mural of cuts of meat. Mable’s is more plainspoken, given over more to a Midwesterner’s taciturnity than a Southerner’s bravado. Of course, this austerity is manifest in the food. At Fette Sau and other reliquaries of animal fats, diners pay by the pound, thus lending tacit approval to bouts of massive consumption. At Mable’s, however, an order of beef brisket ($14.95) consists of one thick slab of meat, a broad ribbon of fat on its upward side beneath a dark brown crust. A hot link—a spicy encased sausage from Schwab’s (available on a $14.95 platter only), an Oklahoma institution since 1912—is just that, a solitary delicious hot link.

This link, like most sides (from goldstandard collard greens to forgettable mac and cheese, both $3.95) comes in a small rectangular paper basket known well to State Fair concession-stand aficionados. Mable’s at times suffers from this State Fairian authenticity: a Velveeta-and-Ro-Tel Queso dip ($5) and a Frito Pie ($5) have no business on a menu in an enlightened world. But they are part of the charm, I suppose. Across vast wood tables on red plastic trays, these small paper dinghies laden with sides beat on, baked beans against the current, borne ceaselessly into the Midwest.