Food Notes: 5/20
Rude Mouth, banana pepper dye, microplastics, and more
Over the weekend, we ended up having a drink at Rude Mouth, a new win bar focused on low intervention wines, in Williamsburg. Our four-year-old was spending the afternoon with my in-laws, so we decided to live it up with a boozy brunch. We ended up eating at Inday All Day, before heading to the wine bar for a drink.
Rude Mouth opened last year replacing long-time neighborhood institution Spuyten Duyvil. The beer bar had been early on the craft beer movement, and they imported European beers at a time when most people thought European beer was just Heineken and Stella Atrois.
Spuyten Duyvil has long been a personally special place, too. A dozen years ago, my wife and I had our first date at the bar. We met up on a Sunday afternoon in 2013 after a handful of messages through an online dating app. We had a drink, then two, then three, and several more, and suddenly it was 10:30 at night and we needed to eat more than a plate of charcuterie.
The Williamsburg late-night dining scene was better back then. I suggested Brooklyn Star. The then-trendy southern-inspired menu had comforting foods like mac and cheese and fresh mashed potatoes. Brooklyn Star also offered a whole fried chicken dinner on weekends. Eating there on Sunday night had been a semi-regular ritual for my friends and I, but the whole chicken was a three-person meal. Since it was just the two of us, we skipped the fried chicken and had the chicken-fried steak instead.
If there is anything to take away from the story at this point, it is that one way of recognizing a good first date is that it keeps on going for eight hours.
Brooklyn Star closed down a few months before our wedding. Ultimately I wasn't all that surprised the restaurant closed. The menu was too heavy and rich for the summer months, and then Brooklyn food trends shifted onto newer and brighter things. We had moved on too. Instead of spending Sunday evening with a few guys eating a lot of fried chicken and beer, we had wives and children and responsibilities beyond stuffing our faces.
Meanwhile, Spuyten Duyvil remained a favorite spot. We did come here with wives for bottles of rosé or the occasional afternoon tipple. Unfortunately, it never really recovered from the pandemic.
The craft beer movement had already peaked. It stopped being a destination for rare beers in part because there were so many other places serving imported or small batch craft beers that it lost some of the unique character. The menu was also filled with empty promises–often, ordering from the beer list was met with, “sorry, we're out of that.”
As the pandemic subsided, Spuyten Duyvil pivoted. The owners shifted to becoming an amaro bar. They might have been onto something with the spirit. Like in the early days of craft beer, there has been a new interest in exploring the different types of flavors that can be turned into bitter Italian-style liquor. The wall behind the bar included an impressive collection of bottles ranging from blood-red to bright candy red. These were great for spritzes, but despite the fledgling market for amaro, the concept never really took off.
When the end was announced, we made plans to visit on the final weekend. The place was crowded, and we were lucky to snag a seat. People even traveled from out of state to see the bar off on its way out. The bar tenders were getting ready for a final blow out party encouraging people to buy out the rare and interesting stock of wine and beer.
I kept an eye on the location after Spuyten Duyvil closed, and took notice when Rude Mouth started renovating. The bar is the product of two sisters, Ava and Sophie Trilling, also originally New Jersyans. They were running popups at bars, according to this interview at Bus Boy, and now Rude Mouth is their first stand alone bar.
A bar focused on low intervention wine seems like the right idea for a spot that has always been ahead of the curve. Low intervention wine isn’t a technical term, but refers to a broad strategy of minimizing certain kinds of intentional choices. This can range from avoiding additives to even allowing natural occurring yeast to do the fermentation. Sometimes, but not always, these wines are organic. Organic wines do have specific restrictions on what can be done to grape vines and to the wine, but that varies by locality.
The big thing to realize with low intervention wine is that often the ideal is imperfect. That can result in fizzy wine, at one time thought a flaw. And like hops in badly made IPA, those imperfections can mask bad wine making — which is why low intervention wines benefit from good curation by the bar tender or sommelier.
Rude Mouth did some intensive renovations, as you can see here in these side-by-side photos from the last night of Spuyten Duyvil in 2024 and this past weekend.
We sat at the bar, the second guests of the afternoon. The new bar is lighter and cleaner looking, more polished and reminiscent of sleek European cafes. But this is how Williamsburg has changed over the last twenty years. New towers, shiny new stores. It's the end of the grungy millennial hipsters, and the dawn of the pretty shimmering Gen Z.
We each started with a glass of wine. I correctly predicted my wife's choice of the chilled red, and after the first drink, we ordered spritzes.
More patrons arrived. A few left when they realized the backyard wasn't open – still a few renovations left to go. A young guy sat next to us and ordered anchovies with a baguette. The dish was simple, but looked delicious. We chatted for a minute, and I explained how we'd been coming here, though to a different bar entirely, for years. He asked about the spritz, and we recommended it.
Unlike on our first date, we didn’t order a third round. Grandma texted us. They were returning the four-year-old to our apartment.
The Latest
Plants Like Plastic As Much As People
We’ve been eating a lot of microplastics, and while we don’t really know all the bad things that plastics do to us, we do know its not great. Well, apparently plants don’t love plastic either. Microplastics are interfering with photosynthesis, which is reducing yields.
The Business of Making Plant-Based Trendy
Vegans, and even the easier to digest vegetarians, remain a minority of the global population. So how can anyone claim its trendy, posits food writer Alicia Kennedy. Kennedy is the author of No Meat Required (which I reviewed), a history of veganism in America. Plant-based products have become trendy, but that’s very different than having large numbers of people suddenly give up on meat. However, focusing on deprioritizing animal products, she argues could make plant-based more appealing, in which case it might actually be trendy.
The Dye Problem
Artificial dyes are getting banned in the United States, which means things like Fruit Loops will need to find substitutes for their candy-colors. Artificial dyes end up in a lot more foods than you might expect, like brightly colored yellow banana peppers. Oliverio Peppers decided to remove artificial dyes years ago, but the whole thing prove a bit trickier than expected. We’re probably going to see a lot more stories like this in the near future.
Faux Lobster
With Memorial Day nearly here, lobstah roll season is finally here. But be warned! Your cheap lobstah rolls might not have genuine Maine lobster!
Oyster Prices
Eater asks the burning question: how much should Oysters cost? The days of dollar oyster happy hours seem behind us. I’ve been spoiled buying fresh oysters at Mac’s for a $1 each (but usually they’re $1.25), and I still have to shuck them myself (or I convince my brother to do it, which is a lot better). Apparently a lot more people are eating oysters these days which is driving up the price. What’s really amazing is New York harbor had once been home to a billion oysters, but thanks to sewage and dead horses, most of those have since died off.