In 2007, the chef Victoria Blamey was provided a job on the finish of her stage (as a kitchen internship is understood) at Mugaritz, a restaurant close to San Sebastian, Spain, that’s thought of to be among the many greatest on the earth. “She distinguished herself on the fish station,” her Website mentions, somewhat modestly. “I’ll wager she did,” I believed to myself as I learn that line the opposite day. At her new restaurant, Mena, in a semi-hidden nook of an unassuming Tribeca resort, she is serving a number of the greatest seafood I’ve ever encountered.
If gulping down the freshest uncooked shellfish evokes the expertise of plunging right into a bracing ocean wave, Blamey’s iteration, one current night, managed to double down on that sensation. She topped a trio of plump, creamy Crowes Pasture oysters, from Massachusetts, with seaweed gremolata—together with shiso, fermented white peppercorns, and cochayuyo, a sort of bull kelp harvested in her native Chile—that someway intensified the oysters’ brininess, pushing them deeper, colder, cleaner. On a go to this previous month, I discovered it arduous to imagine {that a} meaty, sparkly-skinned sardine, filleted and draped over a mound of mayo-dressed boiled potato, had been flown in from Tokyo; it tasted prefer it had swum.
Blamey is not any stranger to the meat station: in New York, she distinguished herself at Chumley’s, an historical West Village tavern that she revived with beef tartare, foie-gras terrine, and a bone-marrow burger with beef-fat fries. There was a rib eye for 2 on the menu at Gotham Bar and Grill, the place she ended up subsequent. However the final time I ate at Mena just one dish would have been off limits for a pescatarian: a loamy morcilla, or blood sausage, served over sourdough fried in pheasant fats and beneath a foam of Upstate Abundance potato—a creamy, nutty varietal bred by the haute-seed firm Row 7—all topped with three concave, al-dente cipollini-onion petals that acted as tiny bowls for a darkish jus-based sauce au poivre, like soup for a trio of fairies.
In the meantime, a slab of Boston mackerel, adorned with a tassel of grilled ramps and garlic-chive flowers, was crackly-skinned and deliciously fatty in a means that evoked pork. Fruits of the ocean had been hiding in a cross-sectioned head of Child Gem lettuce, shock pops of whitefish roe hitting my style buds as I crunched by the crisp greens, and, unlikelier nonetheless, in a dessert: kelp-infused cream went right into a wealthy however ethereal chocolate ganache, which got here with kelp butter and Chilean hazelnuts and was capped in a milk-and-sugar foam.
Excessive-quality seafood doesn’t come low cost. 100-and-twenty-five-dollar prix fixe will get you three small programs (with a number of choices for every), plus dessert; if you happen to order à la carte, you would possibly pay fifty-one {dollars} for a bowl of locro, a conventional Andean stew, that includes snow crab and razor clam. That mentioned, an undercurrent of humility runs by the place. Blamey, carrying a T-shirt and an apron, performs expediter on the kitchen cross, garnishing each dish herself. On my first go to to the restaurant, servers introduced what seemed like overflowing bowls of potato chips to virtually each desk: crunchy fried king-trumpet mushrooms, really, dusted within the French-Indian curry mix vadouvan and piled on Spanish lentils that had been cooked in a Donko-shiitake ragout. That its simplicity was misleading made it no much less right down to earth.
On the drinks menu, beneath the cocktails (together with a seasonal pisco with yuzu and keenness fruit) and non-alcoholic choices (akin to a rousingly perfumed fermented jasmine-green tea, from Unified Ferments), is the single-entry class “One thing Mena.” In Chile, the standard Latin American beverage chicha is normally fermented, alcoholic, and undistilled, produced from fruit, corn, grain, or some mixture of the three. Blamey’s model—developed with Arielle Johnson, a food-science Ph.D. who has labored at Noma—is derived from quince and wild rose hips. Candy on the nostril and woodsy on the palate, with an intense, virtually gasoline-like bitterness, it grew on me. It tasted like attending to the core of one thing. (Prix fixe $125. À-la-carte dishes $18-$51.) ♦
