Mable’s Smokehouse opened in 2011 on the latter end of the New York City barbecue revolution. The restaurant brings Oklahoma-style recipes to the city in a rustic saloon atmosphere, which is the perfect place for my three-year-old.

For many years the only “barbecue” in the city was oven-baked. There was a myth that the city’s smoke scrubber laws prevented real barbecue, but that was mostly not true. Installing smoke scrubbers was expensive but not prohibited, and its now required for places like coal and wood fired pizzerias and matzah factories. But in the aughts, a number of smoke-flavored barbecue joints opened in the city like Fette Sau and Hill Country, and suddenly barbecue was as New York as a pizza bagel. Mable’s opened around the same time as John Brown’s BBQ in Queens, leading the New York Times to pair them together as though barbecue restaurants didn’t warrant their own dedicated review.

Mable’s Smokehouse founding has a familiar story. Founders Jeff Lutonsky and Meghan Love were looking for a way to make it in the city. She was an actress, he worked at an art gallery. Then the recession hit, and everything in the arts fell apart.

Meanwhile, Lutonsky had become known among friends for the barbecue recipes he cooked, borrowed from his mother and grandmother, Mable.

After receiving a small inheritance, they decided to open the restaurant, building out the site themselves. They learned how to do construction to make it happen, only hiring trades that required licenses they didn’t have. The construction took more than a year and a half. They married just before it opened.

Soon after, the restaurant gained notable press which helped drive customers through the door. It was sort of a golden era of food media, and barbecue had been trending across the city. They also chose a location on the north end of Williamsburg near the Brooklyn Brewery placing them at the epicenter of a historical time and place.

At the time the area still felt remote, too far north to really be the heart of hipster Williamsburg, but that rapidly changed and gentrification continued expanding all around it. Today nobody would think of Mable’s as being on the edge of anything.

What set Mable’s apart from the other barbecue joints of the era was a somewhat smaller menu and a decidedly laid back style, designed to look more like a roadhouse and backcountry place rather than a refined fine dining establishment. Not that anyone would think of most barbeque joints as fine dining, but Mable’s was more shabby than chic with mix-matched chairs and tables, and when it first opened food was ordered directly from the kitchen rather than with a waiter.

I’ve been visiting Mable’s off and on since it opened. The delicately decorated bathrooms where one of the inspirations behind my Toilets of New York Tumblr project: They were so well curated, each unique, that I thought they deserved some recognition.

When I first moved to East Williamsburg, I ate here a few times alone because it was one of the few restaurants that felt more of a restaurant than a fast food place, but not so formal that it was weird to eat here alone.

The restaurant also served as an ad hoc bachelor party for a friend of mine when an upstate blizzard cancelled plans to drive to Cooperstown. Instead, we relocated the party to New York City where most of us already lived. We showed up at Mable’s with a dozen men taking over one of the long tables.

On my most recent visit, I was there with a daycare parent and our toddlers. The Board of Education had granted school children an extra day off, leaving us in the lurch for childcare.
We arrived just as it opened for lunch, and were actually the first patrons of the day, which is the ideal way to eat out with two feisty three-year-olds.

I’ve had the brisket and the ribs and both are great. But since it was just lunch and I was trying to watch a three-year-old who didn’t want to stay in his seat, I went with the easy to handle pulled pork sandwich. It’s been on the menu since the restaurant opened.

The price today is almost twice the original $9.95, but it remains a solid sandwich.

I originally intended the mac and cheese for my toddler. He had two of the macaroni and then proceeded to fight with his school friend over the two trucks I had brought for them to play with.

I love the macaroni and cheese here because it’s so simple and creamy. “It’s velveeta” Lutonsky told Eater in 2012.
I suspect he’s doctored it a bit, but unlike other barbecue joints, there isn’t much pretense here. I also appreciate that this isn’t a baked macaroni and cheese, but rather intentionally creamy and smooth.

There’s no denying these sweet potatoes are sweet, but they are one of the best sides of all the city’s barbecue joints.

The sweet potatoes were honestly better than I remembered. They are sweetened with sugar and marshmallow, and there’s a bit of crunchy pecans tossed in too. It’s a little sugar bomb, but absolutely delicious.

As we hastily finished up, the two kids ran under the long tables. We knew it was time to leave, and just as we were packing up the strollers, other customers started arriving. Mable’s is way too delicious not to return sometime soon.

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