Snip:
There's a saying in Yiddish my Great-Aunt Sadie used to tell me when we'd visit her in Ft. Lauderdale: "If you're going to eat pork, get it all over your beard." As an 8-year-old to whom puberty and halakha were both just three-syllable words, I was confused. Now I realize it's the Yiddish version of "Go Big or Go Home." At any rate, Traif, a new restaurant at the Brooklyn base of the Williamsburg Bridge, is full of happy eaters, beards glossy with bacon grease. Apparently they each have a Great-Aunt Sadie of their own.
It takes chutzpah to open a restaurant specializing in pig parts just a stone’s throw from Hasidic-heavy South Williamsburg and its scary forelocked squads of Shomrim. It’s like if someone opened a gay bar called Infidel right outside Mecca. “Two for one Heinekens for hajjis.” But two things save Traif: Its chef/owner, Jason Marcus, is a Jew. And also, he’s pretty good at his job. Marcus’ menu is exhaustive, ever-changing and printed daily in a font called Bradley Hand. Given the general unsavviness of Traif’s design, I doubt whether Marcus was aware the font was designed by Briton Richard Bradley, a Bible lecturer and typographer whose oeuvre consists mostly of creating fonts for Christian literature. Type nerds, though, can’t miss the irony.
I LOVE it. Thank you for sharing this. Sounds like Aunt Sadie was quite a gal.