When chef Alex Stupak announced he was leaving WD-50 and the world of modernist cuisine to open a Mexican joint in the West Village, the food world seemed perplexed to say the least. Afterall, this was a talented pastry chef making the strange leap into tacos and tequila.  Open less than a year, his restaurant, Empellon, is not only surviving, but by the looks of the nightly crowds in the dining room, it seems to be thriving.  In fact, he's already working on a second outpost, called Empellon Cocina. With just 65 seats his newest venture will serve as a more upscale counterpart, trading tacos for a tasting menu and tortilla chips for elegant ingredients and plating.  Stupak envisions tasting menus with wine pairings.  

Just what kind of food will Stupak be making at Empellon Cocina? Modern Mexican, or perhaps seasonal Mexican?  He refuses to put a label on it.  "Whether it's modern or authentic or whatever...I don't really care anymore," he tells us.  Don't expect foam or what Stupak dubs "fancy magic tricks."  While  he insists that he's not trying to revive an old cuisine or reinvent it, the menu will stick to traditional cooking methods.  There will be plenty of regional cooking with Stupak's inspired spin on it.  One of the dishes he's testing for, what he's already nicknamed, "Cocina" is a traditional Oaxacan dish of fried eggs with an hoja santa leaf and tomato-based sauce. Taking his own liberties with the preparation, Stupak substitutes in duck eggs instead of chicken eggs and adds duck meat and sweet potato into the mix. (Sounds good to us.) 

The menu is still a work in progress, but we've coaxed a few dishes out of the chef, including an amaranth-stuffed avocado with sea urchin salsa borracha (pictured above).  We'll get to see the rest of the menu (with a focus on tasting menus) come November when Empellon Cocina opens its doors.  The space is still a work in progress, too, but there are plans for a semi-open kitchen, 7-seat bar, mural-covered bathroom and a gallery wall, similar to the back room at Empellon, which is adorned with family photos.  After cooking at places like Alinea and WD-50, expectations are high for Alex Stupak and his next project.  "There's a fine line between excitement and terror, I'm definitely experiencing both of those emotions right now... I just want it to be great," he says.

RG Writer: Lauren Bloomberg

Right around this time each year, as the weather finally begins to warm up, we start craving Latin flavors and its vibrant spices. So we were excited to find out that Julian Medina, the chef behind both Yerba Buena outposts and Toloache, had plans to open a "Latino diner." And we're even more thrilled to learn that it's open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

 

Just this week, Chef Medina flung open the doors of his funky eatery in Chelsea.  Decked out in checkerboard floors and red and blue leather banquettes (meant to evoke the bench seat of your uncle’s old Chevy), the space has all the underpinnings of a classic diner. Bar stools, coffee service and a dessert display scream greasy spoon, but nothing is as conventional as it looks. The coffee is Cuban and consulting pastry chef Pichet Ong has stocked the dessert case with creations, like chocolate- dipped churros and avocado ice cream.  And like any respectable diner, breakfast is served all day, which is a very good thing when you’ve got a hankering for huevos rancheros in the evening…on a Tuesday.  Medina injects his Latino touch into comfort food standards, like mac & cheese with chicharon (fried pork rinds) as well as chicken wings, served with a spicy chocolate glaze in lieu of your garden variety buffalo sauce. Chicharon pop up again on the sandwich menu in the pan con lechon where crackling pork rinds are layered with red onion and garlicky mojo sauce, which sounds like the perfect cure for late-night munchies.

 

The menu tops out at around $16, which will afford you some great dishes, including ropa vieja and pescado encendido,  potato-crusted fillets of tilapia over a fufu (mashed green plaintains) and a rich tomato salsa (pictured right). Daily specials rotate by region: Monday is Cuban night, a twice-cooked skirt steak, while Sunday honors the Caribbean with rum-glazed shrimp.

 

This diner remake is neither for the diet conscious, nor the vegetarian, but we're pretty confident that hungry night crawlers as well as the brunch crowd will flock for Medina's blue corn pancakes with blueberries and agave nectar. It’s an all-hours spot with an all-hours menu for a city that never sleeps.

I love robata (open-fire grill) cooking.  I love yakitori, izakayas, and sushi, too.  In fact, I'm pretty much in love with the entire genre of Japanese food.  So when Mr. Robata opened it midtown just a few weeks ago, I was eager to there.  My only concern was the location.  Historically speaking, the theater district isn't exactly a dining destination.  Most New Yorkers only eat in the theater district out of necessity, like when they're seeing a show or work in the neighborhood.  From a restaurant perspective, it's hard to survive unless you're surviving heaping platters of spaghetti and meatballs (Carmine's) or unlimited breadsticks (Olive Garden).   So I was a little skeptical about what I would find.   

The first thing you should know about Mr. Robata is that it's right next door to Flash Dancers, "A Gentleman's Club."  That's what is says on the strip club's sign anyway.  This did not bode well.  I was early for my reservation, so I stood outside, watching a few seedy characters pass in and out of Flash Dancers.  (The ones on their way out seemed much happier than the ones on their way inside.)  If my friend's cell phone hadn't run out of batteries, I probably would've aborted the plan and gone elsewhere.  We decided to press our luck and hope for the best.  Just imagine someone plopped a stylish, yet serene Japanese restaurant down next to a strip club and you've got the idea. There's a long, blonde wood robata-cum-sushi counter where you can either sit in front of the sushi chef or the robata grill.   Now you don't see robata grills (robatayaki) that specialize in sushi, or at least ones that do both well stateside.  That made me nervous.  While most people (or the sensible ones anyway) would steer clear of the sushi, I consider the presence of a sushi bar a challenge.  I mean, if you're going to try be "two restaurants in one," you ought to know what you're doing.  

The menu itself is big, too large if you ask me, and it's peppered with fusion-style dishes, like a quinoa, poached shrimp, and avocado salad with shiso dressing or an anchovy-miso fondue with exotic crudite.  I'm a traditionalist, so I stuck with an appetizer of shisito peppers and several kinds of grilled vegetables cooked over the robata, the best of which were meaty eringi mushrooms anointed in teriyaki, zucchini, and asparagus with lemon and salt. Everything cooked on the robata comes with a trio of dipping sauces, which included shiso mayo (great), passionfruit ponzu (fine), and wasabi cream cheese (not a fan).  There's a terrific entree of  saikyo-marinated sea bass, served with a unique and tasty array of vegetables, including wilted bok choy, grilled endive, mushrooms and black truffles.  For $32, you'd think they would use truffle oil or skip the truffles altogether, but they were surprisingly generous, and even more importantly, surprisingly good in the ensemble.  I was set on sushi, so I ordered the Tasmanian salmon sashimi, Montauk fluke, mackerel and the botan ebi shrimp sushi.  Truth be told, I was ready to hate it, or even worse, fear for imminent food poisoning.   But it was really very good, especially the fluke, which was markedly fresh and flavorful.  While I'm not a fan of fusion of the tuna tataki, tomato salsa, with wasabi cream cheese sorts (yes, that's an actual dish on the menu), I would definitely return for the robata and sushi offerings.  As for dessert, we had the homemade mango and lychee sorbet, an impressive and refreshing finish to the evening.  Not a bad first impression, Mr. Robata.


Mr. Robata
Address: 1674 Broadway, btwn. 52nd & 53 Sts.
Phone: (212)757-1030

When pastry whiz Alex Stupak announced this fall that he was leaving WD-50 to open a taqueria, the food world at-large scratched its head.  Why would someone with Stupak’s pedigree leave the kingdom of molecular gastronomy (or modernist cuisine, or whatever the term du jour might be) to sling tacos in the West Village?    So we sat down with him to find out what inspired this sudden and unexpected move.  Stupak explains, "My goal was to open a restaurant of my own by the age of thirty." He had worked not just in the kitchens of WD-50 and Alinea, but also staged at some of the finest restaurants in the world including, Copenhagen's Noma.  While most assumed he'd continue along that path, he wasn't convinced.

While planning his wedding in East Los Angeles, where his wife was born, he fell in love with Mexican food of the Cali/TexMex mash-up variety.  During a meal with his mother-in-Law, he decided that if he was going to open a restaurant, it had to be one where he would enjoy eating three meals a day.  For Stupak, Mexican food hit that mark and during that meal, Empellon was born.

Stupak and his wife, Lauren Resler (Babbo), who happens to be a pastry chef herself, traveled to Mexico to do research and discover authentic regional cooking.  They began their trip in Oaxaca (although the food is not necessarily Oaxacan bound), where they fell in love with ingredients, like mezcal (a smoky, distilled tequila-like alcohol made from the maguey plant, a form of agave), flying ants and grasshoppers.  They loaded up on ideas,  food and even artwork to bring back for their new restaurant.

Empellon is a 90-seat eatery, furbished with black leather banquettes and modern Mexican artwork as well as personal photos of the couple’s friends and family (including a picture near the kitchen of their pet cat).  The menu is organized into   menu items described as “for the table,” like guacamole with chips and two salsas and chicharons (fried pork rinds), and starters  like sopes (round cornmeal cakes topped with cheese, meats and salsas) and ceviches.  For such a large space, the dining room is surprisingly cozy enough to settle into a few plates and some mezcal with a chaser of housemade sangrita.

The entrée section is dominated by a half dozen, taco preparations, everything from chicken with greens and chorizo to beer-braised tongue and carnitas (roasted pork).  There's also a selection of closely curated plates, like octopus (pictured above) with parsnips, sesame seeds and salsa papanteca.  Stupak’s favorite is the lamb barbacoa because, "it’s a not-so-traditional spin on a traditional dish with the addition of mezcal and lack of a barbecue pit."  Instead the lamb is seasoned with guajillo chile and salt before being wrapped first in avocado then banana leaves and steamed overnight. Empellon's become a real family affair.   Ms. Resler’s brother, Matt Resler, came out from LA to work as the bar manager, and on the day we spoke with Stupak, his father was in town lending a hand.  For further reading on Empellon and the menu, head to Eater or Grub Street.

Empellon
Address: 230 West 4th St., at W. 10th St.
Phone: (212)367-0999
www.empellon.com 

RG Writer: Lauren Bloomberg

While everyone was lounging on the beach and seizing the last days of summer, Rouge Tomate was busy revamping its menu and its dining room.  It was always an original concept: There aren’t many, if any, restaurants with a pedigreed chef, locally sourced ingredients, an in-house nutritionist that clocks calories, and a S.P.E. charter  devoted to Health Through Food.  The result is a Michelin-starred meal that you don’t have to feel guilty about.  Really, the only drawback was the formality of the menu and the size of the plates.  Nowadays, no one likes to commit to one dish, so they tossed that concept and started from scratch.   Rouge Tomate 2.0 has newly installed an upstairs lounge and a small plates menu for casual, grazing endeavors that’s available anywhere you sit. 

It’s a smart move.  Now, you can nibble on chef Jeremy Bearman’s imaginative, small-scale creations, including various crostini and crudo offerings with one of their fresh-squeezed cocktails.  There's a Maine crab crostini with local corn, avocado, and cilantro, a Jersey tomato and burrata crostini, as well as eggplant caponata with prosciutto and golden raisins.   If you can't make up your mind, get a sampling of three or five crostini. The menu also features an impeccably fresh Long Island fluke crudo with melon, mint, jalapeno and kaffir lime oil.  There’s homemade gnocchi crowned witha poached egg and trout a la plancha with sweet onion remoulade, asparagus, caramelized pearl onions, dressed with a pickled ramp vinaigrette.

Rouge Tomate’s also introducing a five-course, chef’s tasting menu, a progression of dishes intended to meet all major nutritional needs.   How many other five-course tasting menus are less than 900 calories?  I can’t think of any.  And it's designed, so you won’t drift off into a food coma at your table. 

Address: 10 East 60th Street, btwn Madison & Fifth Aves.
Phone: (646)237-8977
www.rougetomatenyc.com