Greedy NYC - Part 3

Even more places to which I would return in NYC

The third instalment of my NYC recommendations, all added to the Greedy Map (link below paywall).

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Brennan & Carr
3432 Nostrand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11229, United States

Okay, so New York is this city called Manhattan where everyone has something to prove. Wrong! Have you been to Carnesie? Well, it’s by the sea but you’d never know, since it could be anywhere where clapboard houses are decorated by Trump flags, shamrocks and the Italian tricolour. It was raining when we went, but I feel like it must always be raining upon those roads, upon this bastion of a kind of not-quite suburban New York too far from the Island and its money to be gentrified.

Step in Brennan & Cars, a roast beef sandwich joint. Back in Devon, we’d often have roast beef sandwiches on Sunday evening or Monday lunch, using up leftovers from the roast. The beef would be thick, a touch chewy, but terribly flavourful – the West Country has the best grass, and so the best cows. And it was this that I imagined. Wrong! In America a roast beef sandwich is made of very thinly sliced cow; so much easier on the gnashers, but a little dry, a little flavourless. Well, at Brennan & Cars – which I decided was serving Irish birria tacos – this problem is solved by better beef, and make entirely unthinkable by beef broth. Your sandwich can come two ways, soaked in broth or accompanied by a pot of it – the first option seemed mad, impossible to eat, so we opted for the second. And you know what? It works. Alongside our awesome sandwiches, fries with ‘cheese’ sauce and onion rings, both delicious, washed down with free refills of soda in a paper cup.

Our server wore a white jacket – reminiscent of a butcher – and a black tie. His ears stuck out and his smile was wide; he was middle-aged and brilliant. I asked how long he’d been working here and he said since he was a teen, though he only did one or two days a month now. Why, I asked? Well – he was an accountant and this was something of a hobby, a way to get out of the house (and away from the children) on a Sunday afternoon. Half the waiters, he said, did similarly – he mentioned firemen, plumbers and other well-paid and unionised white-ethnic jobs.

I love Brennan & Carr.