Fette Sau is Closing This Month After 18 Years in Williamsburg

The lauded Williamsburg restaurant opened in 2007, inspiring a city-wide BBQ boom

Raise a napkin and a fork for Fette Sau. After 18 years of smoking, slathering, rubbing, and serving some of the borough’s best BBQ, the institutional Williamsburg restaurant is shutting its doors.

This past weekend, the restaurant announced on Instagram (read below) that it would be plating its final meals at the Metropolitan Avenue location in just a few weeks. “To all our Fette Sau fans, friends, and family, we are writing you with the bittersweet news that we will be closing down shop on December 21,” the restaurant wrote. “We could never have imagined the success and support we found here on Metropolitan Ave.”

The BBQ joint was a hit out the gates, offering, since it first opened in 2007, an East Coast take on Southern comforts that incorporates espresso grounds in the dry-rub and the type of by-the-pound ordering system you’re more likely to come across over a deli or butcher’s counter. It worked, and well, for almost two decades, providing the inspiration for a city-wide BBQ boom and a blueprint for similarly elevated and irreverent operations around the globe.

The team behind the restaurant will hold onto the Philly location it opened in 2012, so if you’re looking for a fix, a short-ish trip down the turnpike should do it. Otherwise, you can pay your respects on Metropolitan Avenue until December 21, or hope with us all it catches a bit of the good fortune that’s been going around as of late, offering second lives to other neighborhood favorites, like Ugly Baby (coming to Williamsburg in 2026), and Chilo’s (revived from termination just a month and change after announcing its closure).