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A left-wing bookstore probably isn’t the first place you would look for char-grilled foods, even if it does include a café, but in Ditmas Park, you take your restaurant specialties where you can get them. At Vox Pop, among the progressives perusing books like The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Marxism for Beginners, you’ll find hungry locals chowing down outside Thursdays through Sundays.

Café owner Sander Hicks was inspired to create the outdoor grilling menu when he cast envious eyes on the Farm on Adderley a few doors down. “I envisioned tapping into this area’s burgeoning market for good food,” he tells us, and so he brought in his ex-roommate, burly former Cornerstone bartender Timothy Foster, to cook grilled portobello caps, tofu patties, bison burgers, rabbit, and ribs. Foster, not the sort of guy you would expect to find flipping tofu burgers, likes the ribs the best: “They’re really meaty — I pick out the vacuum packs individually and slow-cook them with my own sauce and my own rub.” The man doesn’t lie: The ribs are thick and substantial, with nice seasoning. We enjoyed ours as much as our neighbors seemed to like their soy protein. Like Marx said: Each according to his needs.