Brooklyn’s hottest restaurant is Fuds. This place has everything — tubed lamb, breakfast beef stroganoff, a Moby Dick platter, and chicken spanked with cinnamon-garlic dirt and dimpled with a freshwater whale-tit sauce.
Oh, and it does not exist.
The restaurant began as a joke among three comedian friends. The trio handed out menus for their fake Brooklyn eatery at the 2012 Great GoogaMooga Festival, spoofing the real dishes served by the real chefs at the Prospect Park foodie festival with items such as “three trouts stacked on top of each other,” “shanked goat carcass in a powder dress for two,” and the mysterious “Bill Clinton sandwich.” One of the creators said the indulgent, adjective-filled menus and super-serious attitudes at hip new Kings County eateries were the perfect ingredients for parody.
“How did it go from killing and eating what you need, to having all of these words used to describe something so simple?” said Arthur Meyer, a Park Sloper and writer at “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” who created Fuds with fellow funny-people Kelly Hudson and Dan Klein. “ ‘Reduction’ is a word you hear used a lot. That word seems to me so mathematical. It’s just food.”
The menu went viral online, and the threesome quickly realized that they had something special on their hands. For the next two years, they spent their nights and weekends expanding the joke into an entire book, “Fuds: A Complete Encyclofoodia from Tickling Shrimp to Not Dying in a Restaurant,” which Meyer will launch at PowerHouse Arena in Dumbo on March 11.
The comedy writer said he previously worked in catering, and his real experiences there helped inspire the parodies of the foodie culture that, while not exclusive to Brooklyn, seems to flourish here. Meyer described one event that was a particularly rich source of unintentional comedy.
“This one dish, they kept saying to ‘put the tomato at 12,’ as in, place the tomato at 12 o’clock, and everyone was saying, ‘Tomato at 12! Tomato at 12!’” he said.
In addition to the nonsensical dishes from the original Fuds menu items — none of which, Meyer added, are edible — the book includes new and equally inedible brunch and dessert menus, a foreword from Chef Mario Batali (who outlines five things he’d rather be doing than writing a foreword), and a “who’s who” guide to the restaurant floor.
“The chef is the luckiest person, because he gets to taste the food all night while he’s making it,” Meyer said, “and the host is the unluckiest, because they never see the food, they’re just stuffing peppermints and rolls in their pockets.”
Arthur Meyer launches “Fuds” at PowerHouse Arena [37 Main St. between Water and Front streets in Dumbo, (718) 666–3049, ww.power
