On a map, Uruguay looks like a chipped shark tooth embedded in South America’s lower right flank, the legacy, perhaps, of an attack by a hungry but over-ambitious great white the size of Africa.  That’s an apt bit of fancy, as the Uruguayan diet is famously carnivorous, with grass (NOT corn) fed beef dominating tables from Montevideo and Punta del Este in the south to where the serrated tip of the tooth sinks into Brasil’s sun-tanned ass in the north.

While physically it’s the tiny little sweet bread sizzling on a flat top grill next to the huge bleeding hunks that are Argentina and Brasil, Uruguay is no underdog, at least not in the area of  enlightened progressivism: in heavily Catholic, often socially conservative South America, they have been ahead of the game in abortion rights, slavery abolition, universal suffrage and marijuana legalization.

Brooklyn, then, and particularly Williamsburg, must have seemed like ideal soil in which to seed Uruguayan restaurant and have it flourish. Ten years on, Tabaré, one of the scant few of its kind in the whole five boroughs, has withstood well the hurricane force gales of NYC’s restaurant industry – so well, in fact, that its trio of owners have decided to open a second location in Bushwick.