...overcast with a chilling wind foreshadowing the approach of winter. I wanted something warming, something beguiling. An escapist drink. As I walked through Murray Hill on Manhattan’s East Side, a Belgian brown ale sounded good.
Consulting the crumpled piece of paper I’d hastily scribbled an address on that morning, I stopped on a leafy residential block. Above my head, four words were printed in black on a brick red awning: The Cannibal Beer & Butcher.
Once inside, I met Christian Pappanicholas, the owner. “I knew the guy who lived here,” he said as we took seats at a picnic table in the quiet backyard patio. “He used to let us roast pigs out here.”
Dressed casually in blue jeans, a gray cashmere sweater, and a wool flat cap, Pappanicholas is a nose-to-tail evangelist when it comes to his charcuterie. He speaks assuredly, more like a man confident that success would come than someone simply hoping to find it eventually. Which made perfect sense. We were only two doors down from Resto, a Belgian-themed dining establishment that marked his transition from manager to restauranteur. When it opened in 2007, Resto received rave reviews from New York Magazine, the London Times, Food & Wine, and The New York Times. He had won over critics on his first try.
So when he launched The Cannibal—named after the legendary Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx—he was granted the degree of gastronomic freedom that tends to follow accomplishment.
Wild Heaven, a wildly successful start-up due to its Ode to Mercy American brown ale, is planning its own new brewery in Avondale Estates, cheek-by-jowl to Decatur. Three Taverns anticipates a launch of its first beers from a new $1.9 million facility that will feature Belgian styles made on New Street in Decatur. The nano-sized Blue Tarp will open a tasting room and provide tours on College Avenue this summer as well.
