[Pigging by Wilfrid: January 16, 2012]
La Mar Cebicheria Peruana, or Peruvian Pickled Fishery "The Sea," haunts the old Tabla space, bookending the MetLife North Building at the opposite end to 11 Madison Square Park.
It's part of anextensive international chain helmed by Peruvian chef Gastón Acurio - and it's not his only chain. There are also the Astrid & Gastón restaurants in Latin America and Spain, and according to his Wikipedia entry countless more eateries in development.
What does this mean for La Mar, New York? Soulless cooking-by-numbers? Not entirely. One thing it means is that the restaurant pulls a devoted Latino crowd. This, in turn, means lot of dining en familia, and thus more children than you'd normally see in a fairly swank New York dining room after dark.
Upstairs is quite swanky, anyway. Downstairs is a less formal café and cocktail bar. I've seen downstairs packed to the gills, and also surprisingly empty, but the restaurant above - audible through a graceful hole in the ceiling, has seemed pleasantly busy and buzzy each time I've visited.
As for cocktails, in addition to a range of tequilas, La Mar boasts the most extensive selection of piscos (and pisco-like liquors) I've ever seen. This is a restaurant which wears its Peruvian heritage proudly. I looked beyond the predictable Pisco Sour and asked about the Tres Amigos, featuring mosto verde with CarpanoAntica and Campari. "What," I asked, "is mosto verde?" It's a kind of pisco, came the reply (and it is; a fancy one). If you can't beat them - and a smooth, grown-up, almost chocolatey drink it was.
I also liked the aggressively named Apocalipto - another kind of pisco, 100% Rye, falenum, avema. At table, your aperitif will be accompanied by long strips of plantain chips and a spicy-garlicky ajillo for dipping.
Given the joint's soubriquet, cebiches are an obligatory order - although the menu does have a separate list of appetizers; blue shrimp, scallops, corn cakes, potatoes with olives and a quail egg. A warning does apply to the cebiches, though. Everyone has their own personal spice-o-meter, and unless yours has a high setting, tread with extreme caution.
These are hot. Really hot.
The fish is gently pickled in leche de tigre - essentially a blend of lime juice, red onions, and chili. They claim to make a variety of leches for the cebiches here, and I'm sure that's true, but the first I tried - the Limeño - had nothing going on that I could make out but fire and onions.
Now, there are doubtless gastronomes with palates of leather who could detect some subtlety here, but it eluded me. The mix of seafood in the dish - fluke, calamari, shrimp, octopus - was overwhelmed by the stridency of the marinade. This was a dish you ate quickly, waiting for the pain to be over. But that's not the whole story.
Dutifully, I tried an alternative. The Pasión came with a yellow pepper leche and featured slices of raw scallop topped with sea urchin. Spicy? Yes, even angrily so. But the ingredients this time stood up to the assault. The scallop was meaty, the sea urchin sweet, and the flavors successfully surfed the chili heat rather than being upended by it. There are seven cebiches on the regular menu, so there's further scope for investigation.
I've often mentioned by soft spot for Mancora, the inexpensive Peruvian grill on First Avenue. Amusing, then, to see some of their tasty, but rough and ready, specialties get the fancied-up treatment. Causas, for example. Peru is about the potato, as well as about pisco and cebiches, and the causa is usually a hearty, campesino mound of mashed potatoes, stuffed with chicken or fish.
The concept is not unlike the mofongo of the Hispanic Caribbean, where mashed plantains conceal garlicky treasures.
Here there's a special menu section devoted to causas, and they come with their fillings carefully tweezered inside. Good, though; at least that's how I found the Oliva, stuffed with octopus, avocado and piquillo peppers, and underlined by a quail egg-olive oil emulsion. A tasting of causas is available, and might be a good way to go between the cebiches and an entrée.
Main dishes are a mash-up of hearty Peruvian classics and modern dishes which recall - in ambition, at least - Douglas Rodriguez's nuevo Latino fusion. Certainly, Asian touches are evident on the menu - witness "hamachi belly, baby bok choy, thinly sliced scallions, hot sesame oil in a parihuela, tamarind nikei broth." Chino-Latino.
I preferred something more old school.
Tempted by duck with rice (to compare with Aldea) and lomo salteado, I settled on the poetically named tacu-tacu a lo pobre. This is an interesting dish. The tacu-tacu itself is a crispy puck of hash, actually made from long-cooked rice and beans, smashed together. There must be some meat stock in there, because it's richly savory, the texture reminding me - for what it's worth - of scrapple.
Ironically served a lo pobre, it's surrounded by everything else in the kitchen. Sweet plantain, a thick red onion sauce, a slab of hanger steak and a fried egg. The steak was juicily rare, the sauce kicked up the hash, and it all made for happy eating - even if not a million miles from the kind of platos fuertes you can find in Colombian restaurants on Roosevelt Avenue at less than half the price ($29 would be steep, were it not for the inclusion of the steak).
The commitment to pretty plating extends, of course, to dessert. Lúcuma, a sharp-sweet fruit, was served fresh and as a mousse with crushed alfajores, a sort of cookie, and cheesy ice cream. I also liked the sound of suspiro loco ("crazy breath") - dulce de leche, cannoli, port reduction, vanilla ice cream.
La Mar isn't the last word in elegance, fine execution or value for money - cebiches around $20, entrées in the upper twenties, and you might well add a causa or appetizer. But it is probably the most ambitous - and best - modern Latino restaurant we've had since Patria , a gap long overdue for filling.
Admirable too that, in addition to offering a moden view of Latin-American cuisine, it wears its Peruvian roots on its sleeve. An interesting and worthwhile restaurant.
One cool thing about the website is that unfamiliar ingredients will be explained if you let your cursor linger over them.
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