The owners of David’s Brisket House in Brooklyn were probably wise to choose a different name for the new deli they opened in East Williamsburg late last year, even though the new place, Pastrami Masters, adopted its core menu from David’s.

When New Yorkers hear the word brisket these days, they tend to think of brick pits, stacks of cordwood, neon Shiner Beers signs, and Willie and Waylon singing in the background. Those associations are relatively recent ones locally, dating to the renaissance of the smoked-meat sciences in Texas and the national fame of pit masters like Aaron Franklin in Austin.

Before brisket was synonymous with barbecue, its meaning in the five boroughs was the one that you now encounter mainly around the Jewish holidays: a flat slab of beef breast cooked in a closed, humid environment for hours, at which point it not only falls apart unprovoked but also makes its own gravy.

That dish has long been one of the chief attractions at David’s Brisket House. Although David’s has had many owners and probably other names as well, it is thought that the deli was founded by two Jewish men around the middle of the last century, before most of the remaining Jews in Bedford-Stuyvesant left for the suburbs, back when a Brooklyn deli could announce itself as a brisket residence and everybody would know just what that meant.