Text by Nicholas Gill
At Blanca is a 12-seat tasting counter hidden in the back of the Bushwick pizzeria Roberta’s, just beyond the recording studio and the tiki bar, a tomato arrives on a plate. It’s a Canestrino, from Italy, grown upstate in the Hudson Valley at Norwich Meadows Farm. Victoria Blamey, the chef, cooks it for 14 hours with a little sherry amontillado. It mostly holds its shape on the plate, but when cut it collapses into a pool of almost creamy pulp. It’s pure umami. There are slices of bluefin tuna belly picked off the grill with juniper branches on a plate to the side, but it doesn’t matter. At that very moment, nothing could ever taste as good as this tomato.
“It’s just the tomato,” Blamey says from behind the counter.
There are moments like this happening every day in the almost 50,000 restaurants in the city of New York. They have been happening since the city was founded by the Dutch in 1624. These moments come and go, scattered across the five boroughs, from the Sri Lankan restaurants on Staten Island to the natural wine bars on the Lower East Side. Moments of pure joy and ecstasy. When all the elements of life here – all the shouts and horns in the streets and the rumbling of the trains, the sweltering heat of summer or the frigid cold of winter, the rotting garbage in sidewalk trashcans or smoke of the Nuts 4 Nuts carts wafting down 5th avenue – seem to come together magically on a plate.
For restaurants, those moments, when everything works, when the staff is happy and the product is sublime and the clientele is pleased with their meal and the price they paid for it, are near impossible to carve out in New York. This is an awful, terrible, no-good city to run a restaurant. The rent is just too damn high. There are too many options, and the attention span is too damn little. Gone are the days when a Jewish deli, like Katz’s or Russ & Daughters, could open and last for more than a century.
Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50 was one of the most influential restaurants in the world, helping bring modernist cooking into the mainstream, introducing us to squid noodles with melon and beef tongue with cubes of fried mayonnaise. Yet, it only lasted a decade. Momofuku helped initiate a global craving for Japanese ramen and Chinese bao, spawning an empire of pseudo-Asian restaurants across Manhattan and they gradually disappeared. Now the name is easier found on jars of chili crunch and packages of dried noodles that line supermarket shelves. It doesn’t matter the heights you once reached. The mountains you once climbed. All those moments of delectable praise. Time is an illusion here. Longevity hopped on the Hudson line at Grand Central station and headed for the Catskills a long time ago. Five years is the new normal that a restaurant can hope for now in this city.
If you want to stay around, even for a little while, you have to adapt. You have to evolve. Take on a new shape. Eat or be eaten. A few restaurants, those like Honey Badger or Blue Hill, tell stories of farmed and foraged produce and game from the micro seasons of the northeastern United States, but nearly all of the others rely on access to anything. Your pantry is limitless. If someone will pay for it, you can serve it. Carabinero prawns caught off the coast of Spain or heart of palm from a Hawaiian forest. Mexican chiles or Alphonso mango pulp. It can all be flown in. Trucked in. Smuggled in a suitcase. There’s no such thing as seasons in a city that never sleeps.
In the early days of New York City, you could arrive with nothing and survive by picking oysters right out of the harbor. Entire islands, like Ellis and Liberty, were built around them. Oyster islands, they were called. You could find these bivalves in oyster houses or sold on street corners. Sometimes they were pickled with nutmeg and saved for later. For centuries, it was our preeminent local ingredient. By 1927 all the oyster beds in all of New York City, the world capital of oysters you could say, had been depleted. The oysters of New York disappeared. If you find them on a menu today, they’re from New England or the West Coast. That might change. The reefs are coming back, a billion oyster seeds are being planted here. At least they’ll help filter the water. Will we ever eat them again? In a century, they say, if all goes to plan.
How do you stand out when nothing stays the same? Even if, somehow, you are able, how many times can you capture the zeitgeist? How many times can you get a shout out in Eater or Grub Street while waiting for a review in The New York Times that might not ever come? What’s the cuisine of the week? Is Korean over already? It seems like it just got here, even though it was always here. Tacos de suadero with tortillas made from heirloom Oaxacan corn? No, no, no. It’s seafood tostadas now. But that’s over too. Now it’s regional Indian and pintxos. Tasting menus died during the pandemic. Or did they? Now they’re back and now they are gone again.
A cook or a restaurant’s identity has to shift. It has to mutate and recompose itself a thousand times in the course of a week if they want to stay relevant in New Amsterdam. I mean the Big Apple. Aka the City of Dreams. Lenapehoking. Or maybe Gotham City, the same one as the comic books, is what it should have really been called all along? Look at Contra. It was open for a decade and had the Phaidon book and pop ups from international friends. Now it’s a cocktail bar. Then there’s Brooks Headley, who had a rare 4-star review in the Times at fine dining landmark Del Posto, but now at Superiority Burger he’s making vegan burgers and is doing better than ever. Eleven Madison Park went plant based, while 1950s Ukrainian hangout Veselka schlepped to Brooklyn. Don’t get too comfortable wherever you land. The rent keeps going up and the flavor of the month keeps changing. You can only find a location so deep in Brooklyn or Queens before you end up in the Atlantic Ocean.
When Carlo Mirachi opened Blanca in 2012, it was Italian, but not really. He earned two Michelin stars there, then it closed at the start of the pandemic when that type of restaurant became impossible, and he turned his attention to wood fired frozen pizzas. In 2024, when it was time for the restaurant to reopen, he left the bluefin tuna head on the wall and the captain chairs lining the bar but gave the reins to Blamey. She once cooked at Chumley’s, where she reimagined Manhattan tavern food. Then went on to Gotham Grill, becoming the first female head chef in its more than three decades of history. There were the pop-ups at Stone Barns and Fulgurances, then she briefly opened an intimate space downtown called Mena, where shellfish and seaweeds filled up the walk in. Everywhere she went she brought a little bit of her youth in Chile with her, her training in kitchens in New York and Spain, travels in Italy and beyond, adapting to each setting as was necessary.
Blamey is no longer cooking a la carte. It’s a tasting menu. They are back in again. Just in the last five minutes. It’s right in front of me now. Dishes keep coming out. There’s the soft, subtle sweetness of sea urchin ceviche that’s soon followed by a briny oyster from Maine with fermented calamansi that slaps you in the face. Up and down, around and around. Someone puts a Grateful Dead album on the record player in the corner and the tunes move in and out from one another. It’s like a jazz set. You can’t tell where one song stops and the other begins. Out comes an empanada, buttery like a French pastry but stuffed with Dungeness crab and fermented black beans. There is even a touch of Chartreuse in there and Chartreuse is nothing less than every flavor imaginable all at once. Tortilla al rescoldo appears, cooked in a wood oven, just over the coals, like in the Araucanía countryside, then, finally, the lamb, dripping with blood, beside some freekeh, sent by farmers in the West Bank, maybe the last harvest they’ll ever have. It’s there so that we don’t forget that were not so disconnected. That even in this minimalist bunker of Zen, these joyful moments of perfect tomatoes won’t last forever.
