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Pour one out for BrisketTown, the beloved Texas-style barbecue restaurant from Daniel Delaney in South Williamsburg. The restaurant at 359 Bedford Ave. — one of New York’s essential barbecue restaurants — will close on Sunday after four years of serving some of the best brisket in town. Delaney tells Eater that he was forced to close the restaurant after the building sold to a developer. He fought to stay. “Honestly, it’s kind of sad for me,” says Delaney, who first opened the restaurant in 2012 after years of working as a videographer.
But the restaurateur and pitmaster plans to keep serving his barbecue elsewhere. BrisketTown’s parent company, Delaney Barbecue, will still offer catering and will do pop-ups throughout the summer.
Delaney also has plans to open a new restaurant with barbecue on the menu, a “hospitality-oriented, ultimately Southern restaurant,” he says. He has been eyeing real estate since he heard the building sold a couple years ago, nearly inking deals in Greenpoint, Dumbo, and the East Village.
Any new project would be a full-service restaurant with the same BrisketTown barbecue recipes, but expect a bigger menu, with the addition of items like fish, grilled dishes, and salads, Delaney says. “One of the biggest learnings that we’ve had is barbecue is great as a once a month meal, but it doesn’t provide the type of dining experience where someone would be able to go twice a week,” he says. “If your goal is to properly serve a community, you have to be able to provide offerings that are more versatile than the aggressive meal that is barbecue.” It will likely be in a location that’s “more accessible” than the current BrisketTown.
Delaney sent an email about the closing to followers of the restaurant on Thursday and says he has felt down about it all day despite plans for reopening. “I’m a pretty sentimental person,” he says. “It’s extra hard for me, number one.”
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