FOOD BLOG REBELLION: We are PISSED about ‘Brooklyn BBQ,’ whatever that is

Here is the absolute worst tweet you will ever see.

Now, before we begin, a few items: 1) the article correctly asks why specifically Brooklyn BBQ is taking over the world; 2) the article was originally written in 2014 but Munchies only Sunday decided to re-up this vile take; 3) there is no such thing as Brooklyn BBQ.

Here are two more tweets that will utterly infuriate you.

We’ll come back to this later, because our antagonist doubles down on his bullshit. To wit:

Let’s blast off the steam pipe of anger on “my objectively true tweet” and calmly — as best we can — point out to Max Tani, objectively a moron, that traveling outside of Brooklyn and Brooklyn’s culinary offerings will often yield impressive gustatory experiences all over this country. New York certainly houses a large and diverse population — and with those people came myriad influences, riffs, and specialties of cuisine — but New York doesn’t own the gold medal on refining those cuisines. New York is merely a thumbtack in the rich tapestry of American culinary endeavor, which itself reaches far outside of itself for creative spark.

What’s at issue here is that the international community necessarily must search beyond Brooklyn’s BBQ scene — which is physically painful to write, let alone read — to drive into the heart of American BBQ. American barbecue is always already highly regional, with Texas, Missouri, Georgia, Tennessee (?), and both Carolinas laying claim to the country’s premier barbecue states (it’s South Carolina, by the way, and if you disagree, you can step the hell off).

Perhaps most offensive here is that someone at Munchies decided “Brooklyn BBQ” has become an actual, cultural, culinary thing. It’s not. “Brooklyn BBQ” is merely some mustachioed fuckwit’s take on what has already been perfected in the Carolina low country. “Brooklyn BBQ” is always already derivative, inauthentic, and secondary. “Brooklyn BBQ” is overpriced tourism for your stomach, and it has no place in the American BBQ discussion. Throw “Brooklyn BBQ” in the trash, then throw that trash into another trash, then fire that trash into the sun, because “Brooklyn BBQ” as an actual term lowers our level of discourse below that of raccoons.

That this article even needed to be written — in 2014, mind, and reshared in 2018 — is a troubling sign of the times. Brooklyn already enjoys an overabundance of cultural cache in the American imaginary, and its constant need to draw all of Americana into its magnetic orbit and claim that it has somehow “perfected” that particular corner of American experience — especially in the case of foodstuffs — is arrogant and awful.

Sit your damn ass down, Brooklyn, and let a real artist smoke some meat. Lord almighty.