El Haab's and the Haab-nots

El Haab, The Haab or simply Haab, Joaquin Velasquez’s new Mexican joint, opened with little fanfare in mid-August on a charmless Williamsburg street. This follows in the proud tradition of hardworking, low-key restaurants that have popped up on the strip of Grand Street between, say, Union and Graham avenues.

El Haab, the name is a term for one of the Mayan calendars, has burrowed into a Leonard Street storefront. The eateries on this restaurant row are of varying quality and surprisingly varied cuisine. There’s The Wombat, blithe Australian food; The Willburg Café, an amusingly genuine café; Lily Thai, solid Thai; Le Barricou, an authentic bistro du coin. All service the neighborhood denizen on his way to or from a nasty hangover, and all are united by a uniform lack of buzz. Let Manhattan have flash-in-the-pan hotspots. This is salt-of-the-earth—or at least sea salt of the earth—restaurant row.

The largely undiscerning palate of locals means El Haab doesn’t have to be very good. It could be just OK and do fine. After all, it’s only el burro que trabaja doble. But happily, El Haab belongs to that other great countervailing Williamsburg trend: small and very good Mexican restaurants. El Haab’s cohort includes La Superior, El Mesa Coyoacan and Taco Chulo, places that offer simple Mexican food that uses fresh ingredients and is sold at prices not too much higher than what you’d pay at some taqueria in La Roma, DF.

Like these other restaurants, El Haab isn’t innovative. It traffics in authenticity, not novelty. On the menu at El Haab you’ll find the traditional taxonomy—burritos, quesadillas, tacos, tortas and appetizers— most available with the canon of Mexican meats: pork al pastor, marinated steak, shredded chicken and grilled shrimp. This is Mexican food for dummies.

On a recent visit, I began with the elote placero, traditional Mexican corn on the cob. It’s sweet all right—white corn kernels, the unholy mayonnaise and butter, cheese—but a bit of chili powder and a squeeze of lime temper the sweetness. There’s nothing new here, no quirky addition of cotija foam or panko dust. But why fuck with a good thing? I chased the corn with the Gringa Quesadilla, figuring it was the most appropriate. It was a beast, belying Velasquez’s belief, perhaps, that the only thing that pleases a gringo more than a quesadilla stuffed with pork is a quesadilla stuffed with pork and beef and cheese and pinto beans. It was a meat-andcheese flavor explosion, especially topped with small fiery dabs of Salsa Diabla, El Haab’s homemade hot sauce. It was good, if overwhelming. On subsequent meals, I’d isolate each element to best suss out the strongest, cycling through the pork quesadilla, the beef quesadilla and the cheese quesadilla with a scientific eye. Without a doubt, the quesadilla al pastor wins. It’s like culinary Clue. It was the pork in the quesadilla with the smokiness!

The pork also finds itself particularly well used in El Haab’s substantial and daily brunch menu, which seems engineered especially to provide succor to the hungover freelancer free to eat cheap eggs at 11 a.m. On a recent Tuesday, it was only me, a hangover and a heavy plate of chilaquiles— fried then simmered tortilla triangles doused with a green chile sauce—at El Haab. Topped with two eggs over easy and a scoop of pork, the meal was both horribly bad for me and completely salutary. I left, sleepy and full, to drift past Grand Street’s restaurant row, peeking into half empty cafes on a full stomach.

>> El Haab 202 Leonard St. (betw. Grand & Maujer Sts.), Brooklyn, 718-388-4261.