Eats.com - Get Your Goat

Get Your Goat

It’s not every day that a woman named Stella will pull up outside your restaurant in a Bentley, sit down, eat a goat head and then request that one be sent out to her driver as well. But according to Denson Jefferson, the manager at Cabrito (or “young goat” in Spanish), that’s exactly the kind of thing that happens at the popular Mexican spot in the West Village.

“As a signature dish in New York, [goat] is kind of out there,” says Jefferson. “But it’s worked and we’re finding day by day that there are more and more goat lovers.”

Cabrito is the brainchild of Chef David Schuttenberg, and is part of Zak Pelaccio’s small but successful collection of restaurants, which also includes Fatty Crab and most recently Fatty ‘Cue. After working with Pelaccio on various projects, Schuttenberg, who hails from the Southwest, was itching to cook Mexican. More specifically, the chef was eager to try one dish – cabrito.

“I showed Zak the menu and he’s like, ‘You’re going to cook goat?” I told him, ‘I want to cook goat bad,’” says Schuttenberg. “I had never touched a goat in my life, but we drank all this scotch, ended up naming the place goat and I thought, ‘OK. I’ve pretty much solidified what my signature dish is and I better damn well figure out how to do it.’”

What he found was that goat is not an easy animal to cook. Schuttenberg’s first attempt at making the dish involved a 24-hour pineapple marinade and resulted in a mealy, inedible final product.

“It’s been rough,” says Schuttenberg. “It seems to me that [goat] goes from undercooked to completely overcooked in a very, very small window. There’s never really one set way to do it. It really becomes more of an experience than a technique.”

Luckily for New Yorkers, Schuttenberg has mastered the experience of cooking goat. The signature dish – goat rubbed with sour orange, garlic and chili, then slow roasted and served with salsa borracha and warm flour tortillas – is a popular choice on the menu.

Of course, Cabrito isn’t the only restaurant serving goat in New York, but with its authentic Mexican preparation and more adventurous takes on the animal, the West Village spot definitely has some of the must-try goat dishes in
the city.

What could be more adventurous that eating goat stuffed into tortillas? We were asking ourselves the same question until we heard Schuttenberg and Jefferson chatting outside before the impending dinner rush. They stood under the hanging pink goat that marks the entrance to Cabrito, when one of them asked the other, “So how many goat hearts do we have for tonight?”