Fette Sau: literal translation is fat pig, but it has a more unflattering and mischievous meaning in German.

In the early spring of 2007, Joe Carroll opened Fette Sau, a barbeque restaurant with a bar focused on local craft beer and small production American spirits.  The menu is simple and focused on the meats, all of which are heritage breeds raised naturally by small family farms and contain no antibiotics or hormones.  The barbeque is one part Central Texas and one part New York Deli.  The meat is ordered by weight and served on butcher paper.   All the traditional barbeque cuts are served along with plenty of not-so-traditional things like beef tongue pastrami, pork belly, and veal heart.

By the time he signed a lease on the vacant garage, he knew exactly what kind of spot he wanted to open: an amalgamation of the best bits of barbecue culture picked up over the years and a friendly, unpretentious place where meat was king. And he didn’t want our barbecue to be handcuffed to any regional style of barbecue.

His style of barbecue had become impossible to categorize, having incorporated a cut of meat from one region, a hardwood from that one, and a smoking technique from another, until the result was a mutt of American ‘cue filtered through the mind of an Irish-Italian kid from Jersey.

-Excerpt from “Feeding the Fire”, by Joe Carroll & Nick Fauchald