You can find my most recent feature here.

This piece is part of the Reviews section, where I visit restaurants, bars, and drinking establishments and look closely at the cooking, hospitality, and cultural theater of going out.

Reviews, like Friday features, are always free. But if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

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Walking into Smithereens feels like entering a submarine. You descend from street level into a low-ceilinged basement at 414 East Ninth, just west of First Avenue, and find yourself inside a dark capsule of brushed metal, blackened wood and various marine blues. The front of the bar is mottled to resemble the inside of an oyster shell, and the floor is reclaimed cork. It does not look much like a New England seafood restaurant, unless, of course, your idea of New England aesthetics begins with a shipwreck.

Down here, the normal rules of food and beverage do not apply, at least not directly. Smithereens is a bizarro underworld restaurant, a place indebted to the (sea)foodways of the Northeast but executed with the dark wizardry of a modern izakaya. The Negronis are salty and the wine tastes like someone made incense from dead flowers and lit it with a particularly sulfurous match. An abalone skewer, threaded with folds of shiitake and charred over the grill, arrives with a glowing, sweet-and-sticky jam of translucent cured egg yolk.

Everything is recognizable, but only after your eyes adjust.

Our server tells us that the buckwheat pancake is a must. On the menu it appears simply as “buckwheat pancake with smoked bluefish,” though the handwritten note offering it “Neptune style” acknowledges its debt to Neptune Oyster in Boston and denotes an optional caviar add-on. Neptune’s famous johnnycake layers cornmeal, smoked bluefish, honey butter, crème fraîche and caviar. This actually sounds kind of bad to me, but it’s probably delicious, and we order the pancake because we were told to. Chef Nick Tamburo’s version keeps the bluefish and sweetness but replaces the johnnycake with a galette-thin buckwheat crêpe, something he learned while cooking in Paris. The fish is hidden underneath; the surface is lacquered with maple and covered in a remarkably even snowfall of chives.

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Maple and smoked bluefish do not immediately sound like obvious bedfellows, but they share an affinity for fire. The maple’s caramelized, woody aromas reach toward the smoke, while its sweetness softens the salt, bitterness and oily intensity of the fish. My dining companion, a native of Charleston who attended conservatory in Boston, recognizes the anadama bread immediately. I do not, but we order it and turn to Google to jog my friend’s memory. Anadama is an old New England loaf made from wheat flour, cornmeal and molasses, associated particularly with the fishing communities around Gloucester and Rockport. Its precise origins are uncertain, though the standard piece of folklore involves a fisherman, exhausted by his wife Anna’s cornmeal-and-molasses porridge, adding flour and yeast while muttering, “Anna, damn her.”

At Smithereens, it is dense, dark and only gently sweet, served in thick slices with a quenelle of butter seasoned with nori and dulse. Molasses and seaweed seems a similarly daring proposition, but it works. The sweetness deepens the loaf’s maltiness while the butter and seaweed pull it toward coastal flavors. It achieves something close to the harmony of the pancake: the bread’s sweet nuttiness, maritime funk from fish or seaweed, and the richness of butter or cream.

This kind of inversion—an upside-down or sideways look at American seafood traditions—is how Tamburo cooks. He grew up in coastal Massachusetts, started cooking while attending Emerson, then passed through Momofuku Noodle Bar and Ko, Blanca, Momofuku Nishi, a wood-fired restaurant in Napa and, finally, Claud, where he was chef de cuisine. At Smithereens, the New England food of his childhood passes through the technical grammar of those kitchens: French sauces, Japanese seasonings, live-fire cooking, raw fish cut with precision.

The amberjack crudo arrived as six silken slices in a loose ring, their pale flesh edged with pink and glossed by a rust-colored citrus dressing. Each piece carried a small spoonful of green blueberry—a tart, vegetal interruption to the fish’s mild sweetness and soft, fatty texture. It looked almost austere, but the flavor was not: rich, slippery fish fillets, sharp fruit, citrus and salt, with the underripe berries bringing the texture and flavor of the amberjack into focus.

Later, a piece of tilefish arrived over spinach and spring onions in a dark reduction, with a pale, savory sabayon beside it. Its scales had been forced upright by heat, each one crisped into a tiny translucent shard, like a brittle stalagmite. They looked prickly enough to repel you, then shattered at the touch of a fork, giving the mild, yielding fish a surface somewhere between crackling and armor.

The wine program follows a notably editorial philosophy. Nikita Malhotra, Smithereens’ co-owner and beverage director, is less interested in building a cathedral of famous bottles than in publishing a new argument every few months. The cellar contains roughly 500 wines, from which she builds a much smaller daily list; every three or four months, she reorganizes the program around a grape, a region or some other governing idea. There have been editions devoted to Riesling, Grenache, skin-contact wine, Champagne, sake and Chardonnay. When we visited in June, the subject was Chenin Blanc.

The format could sound like the work of a person trying very hard to demonstrate that she has taste. Malhotra has the more liberating advantage of no longer needing to prove she knows what she’s doing. Her parents owned a bottle shop on the Upper East Side, so she grew up around wine before studying philosophy and spending six years working in independent bookstores. At Tribeca Grill, she deliberately immersed herself in the classics; she later rebuilt the program at Momofuku Ko around Champagne and Burgundy, winning Michelin’s New York Sommelier Award in 2022. She is now head sommelier at Pressoir, Daniel Johnnes’s wine-events company, which produces La Paulée, La Fête du Champagne and other occasions at which collectors gather to open some of the greatest and most expensive wines on earth.

Smithereens is where she gets to make her weirder moves.

This is not a curious wine list assembled in opposition to fine wine, or by someone who never acquired its vocabulary. Malhotra’s authority comes partly from declining to make that authority the subject. Instead of presenting the cellar as a monument to what she has accumulated, she treats the list as a temporary exhibition: these are the wines she wants to think about now, arranged deeply enough that a single grape becomes more expansive than the usual encyclopedic assortment.

I know Nikita somewhat, so rather than study the Chenin list, I gave her the sort of instruction that is either a gift or an annoyance to a sommelier: pick something from the cellar. No price range, no stylistic preference, no other parameters. She returned with a bottle of 2023 Matin, Midi et Soir, a Chenin made by Vincent Bergeron from vineyards around Montlouis. “I have this Bergeron Chenin for you because, well, I love reductive Chenin,” she said. That was about it.

The wine was indeed reductive, with a thrilling invocation of struck match, burned acacia flowers and cold stone, with Chenin’s lemony nectarine fruit hiding somewhere behind the smoke. Reduction is the accumulation of volatile sulfur compounds when wine is made or raised with limited exposure to oxygen. At its ugliest, it can smell like rotten eggs or garlic and is generally considered a fault. In smaller measures, though, it can produce the smoky, flinty aromas that many of us prize. The boundary between feature and bug here is partly a matter of concentration, but also a matter of taste. I suspect Nikita’s and my taste for reduction might be calibrated to slightly different thresholds. The wine didn’t seduce me exactly, but it was definitely something to return to often, with more an attitude of inquiry than a feeling of pure pleasure. Nikita did not apologize for its eccentricity or provide a technical explanation that would tell us how to appreciate it. Fortunately, the abalone skewer managed to do that work all on its own.

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That editorial impulse extends beyond the wine list. Smithereens publishes a genuinely good zine on Substack filled with staff recommendations, interviews, recipes, wine essays and cultural miscellany; it was, in fact, how I first learned about the restaurant. Each issue arrives with a playlist that generally bangs with stuff you wish you’d discovered yourself. There is also a staff book club in which guests are also encouraged to participate. These do not feel like the usual extensions of restaurant branding, bits of lifestyle content manufactured to keep the name circulating between occasional visits. The taste goes too deep. The zine is curious about books, movies, design and music because the people making it are curious about those things.

Tamburo studied visual and performing arts at Emerson, played in bands and initially imagined music as his life before kitchens took over. Malhotra’s years in bookstores preceded her life in wine. Their professional credentials explain the level of technique in the room, but they do not explain its personality. Neither owner seems particularly interested in resting on the impressive part of the résumé.

To call Malhotra and Tamburo “cool kids” of the restaurant industry would undersell what they do, though they are, I must say, extremely cool. Their taste in music is excellent. Their wine list reads like an elegant periodical. Their staff publishes essays and poetry. This is not coolness applied as a layer of styling to decent restaurant craft. It comes from an excess of intelligence and curiosity beyond their strict métiers—a sense that cooking and sommellerie are not the only two methods available for putting a worldview into circulation. I find their whole approach among the coolest I have encountered in a restaurant. I do not know what that says about me, except maybe that I would like dinner to feel a little like joining the editorial staff of an exceptionally well-dressed maritime journal, or that I might hijack the aux cord on an underwater mission and subject my fellow submariners to an hour of Black Marble or a Japanese City Pop compilation.

Anyway, dessert arrived in the form of a celery float, the metaphorical response to all this deep-sea sensibility. Toward the end of our visit to Smithereens, we found bubbles and buoyancy before ascending to street level. Tamburo makes it from celery-root ice cream drizzled with coffee oil, with cherries marinated in red-wine vinegar and shio koji and a house soda made from carbonated celery juice, citrus and sugar. The dish began with root-vegetable ice creams he experimented with at Momofuku Ko and eventually became a warped recollection of an ice-cream float and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, that beloved and slightly medicinal soda of New York delicatessens. Tamburo has said that diners respond to it with reactions ranging from delight to disgust. I found it absolutely enthralling.

What you see is a soft-looking foam, but what you experience is the most lively carbonation. The celery soda snapped and fizzed around the creamy, earthy ice cream; the cherry landed with a pang of tartness, sweetness and salt. It was bewildering and completely insane, a dessert composed of ingredients seemingly intent on escaping their assigned categories, a dish with a clear raison d’être (celery-on-celery action), and some real freaky, out-of-the-box thinking behind it.

Over the course of my career, I have watched restaurants professionalize beyond what I could have imagined when I started working in New York. Even at expensive places, the staff used to feel comparatively ragtag: artists, poets, aspiring models, musicians, filmmakers, strippers, whatever else. Some were lifers, but many of us believed we were on our way to becoming something else. The work still got done, but all those outside lives gave restaurants a culture that did not come entirely from other restaurants.

Hospitality is now a coherent and increasingly viable career path. This is, in most ways, a good thing. Places are better run, standards are higher, and some forms of exploitation that once passed for the price of admission have become harder to excuse. But professionalization has brought its own kind of convergence. Menus and dining rooms look very much alike, as though they’ve been moodboarded by the same design agency. Service is very “good,” in a way that feels eager for a certain kind of recognition. Sometimes, it feels like everyone involved has studied the same restaurants, absorbed the same references and arrived at the same exquisitely tasteful conclusions. Smithereens offers another possibility: a restaurant run by people who chose this work completely, without allowing the work to become the only culture they possess.

There are people who grow up caring about restaurants, learn to operate them with total professional command and choose to still see the world like artists. Nick, Nikita, and their team have achieved enough technical mastery that technique no longer needs to be the point. Smithereens is a place where everything else they know and care about can enter the work.

You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

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A few weeks ago, I spent forty-seven dollars on a glass of wine and left feeling as though I’d gotten an incredible value.

This was at Stars, the now beloved third act from Chase Sinzer and the team behind Penny and Claud in the East Village. I opened the heavy, metal door to a hypnotic fanfare of dulcimer that I recognized as Four Tet’s Two Thousand and Seventeen. Though I arrived within the first hour of service, I was nervous there would be a wait. Turns out, there was one seat left, right at the end of the horseshoe-shaped zinc top bar that serves as this tiny room’s focal point.

Everything in this room is intentional. Nothing seems oversized. Nothing feels squeezed in. There is very little in the room, and everything that is there appears to have earned its place. A Tom Bloxam-designed custom speaker hangs dead-center, acoustically calibrated for the 450-square-foot space, its frequency range running from 38 hertz to 25 kilohertz (roughly the full spectrum of what the human ear can interpret). The mahogany finish matches the legs of the bar stools. I’m told it can play insanely loud but they keep it at the perfect volume, favoring clarity and focus over low end power. You can hear the music perfectly, and converse at a normal level. A rail runs along the back wall at the perfect height for standing and leaning, effectively doubling the bar’s capacity without crowding anyone.

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The glass of wine in question was Benjamin Leroux Auxey-Duresses, handwritten on the single page by-the-glass menu. Leroux is one of Burgundy’s most respected négociant producers with an impressive lineup of wines that spans from Bourgogne Aligoté all the way through the Grand Cru Bâtard-Montrachet. Auxey-Duresses is a village in the Côte de Beaune without a single Grand Cru vineyard, which means it can’t command the price point that a more famous neighboring vineyards can. Betting on it over Puligny or Meursault is a sommelier’s move: you care more about the style of the person who made it, than the prestige of the appellation, because you know the fruit is almost the same.

Before I’d ever set foot in this place I wrote about it for Caper, as part of a piece about price architecture, and what happens when you take smaller markups and prioritize hospitality. The part most people already know is that this list has eighty-eight selections under eighty-eight dollars, which in Manhattan is a radical statement on its own. The first three pages have something for everyone at a friendly price. The brief sparkling section shows definite range: from a half-bottle of A. Berger Champagne, to a Loire pét-nat rosé from La Grange Tiphaine, to something called Grape Republic from Yamagata, Japan. Whites range from a forty-eight-dollar Txakoli to an Alsatian Riesling from Domaine des Marnes Blanches’s second label, Coup de Jus, to Enfield Chardonnay from California. There is a section for orange wines, another for rosé and coferments. The reds pull from the contemporary natural wine movement, showing names like Hervé Villemade and Rocher des Violettes alongside Ardèche producers I’d never heard of, plus some more familiar picks like a Priorat and a Sangiovese from Emilia-Romagna.

Once you’ve been seated in a comfortable bar stool, offered water and salty marcona almonds, and taken a look at their tremendously reasonable by-the-glass program, only then do you get to see the depth of the cellar. It is a wine list ogglers dream, with in-demand names like Bachelet, Antoine Lienhardt, Ramonet and Roulot. Pages that reveal accumulated obsession, seemingly all with vertical depth and real quantity. Prices get about as high as they do anywhere else, but you can kind of see why. These wines are not available to everyone. You acquire them by having relationships, by spending years building allocation channels, by knowing consigners, by being the kind of operation that producers trust with their tiny production.

Stars wants to serve the person drinking a glass of Jura pét-nat, and the person wondering whether anyone in New York still has mature Raveneau in stock. It wants to be democratic without being simplistic and serious without becoming exclusionary. Wine culture has spent decades treating accessibility and expertise as opposing values. Stars does not seem particularly interested in that argument. It built a list where both things are true, and the list pursues these parallel statements with high levels of swag.

For a room containing a genuinely absurd amount of wine knowledge, the atmosphere was surprisingly free of the annoyances that usually accompany it. Nobody was lecturing or showing off. There were clearly industry people in the room (I recognized Eddie Huang’s voice across the bar before I saw him), but there were also people who had wandered in off the street. A family next to me, parents and a grown son, were asking one of the sommeliers, a young woman, how she knew so much about wine. Gracefully, she told them she did a program called WSET, which provides foundational education, and that she simply enjoys drinking wine and does it a lot.

The food menu is small, in selection, in portion, and in price point. I was overjoyed to learn you could get their much-talked-about deviled eggs by the individual piece. A vadouvan-like curry spiced yolk is piped into the egg whites and topped with puffed chicken skin in the shape of a star. Two bites and a sip of white Burgundy later, it was gone, and nothing about the moment felt like it needed anything else.

The peppadew peppers arrived stuffed with spicy chorizo and candy-sweet, tasting uncannily like a pepperoni pizza. Salty, super tangy, just spicy enough to bully the Burgundy a little. I paused and ordered a glass of Seehof ‘Elektrisch’ Feinherb Riesling for fifteen dollars. It provided a bit of sweetness to moderate the spice and acidity of the peppers, and I could return to the Leroux when my palate had regained its equilibrium.

Later in the evening Chase stopped by the bar. I asked him how he managed to open a place with so much confidence — a beautiful, doubtless expensive build-out, a massive inventory of high-end wine, and extremely affordable options in every category. The math of all this didn’t exactly make sense to me. His answer was something along the lines of: the staff is good, the room is small, we turn seats, and we make sure people are happy.

His answer tracked. All three people on the floor that night were serious sommeliers and the lone person in the kitchen a serious chef. The room was beautiful and the sound system bespoke, the music thoughtfully chosen and the light amber and forgiving. The wine list was affordable and deep, the snacks perfect and available in exactly the quantity you wanted. Everything that actually matters in hospitality was there, and not much else.

By the end of the evening I had spent around ninety dollars. Objectively, ninety dollars for a solo visit is not inexpensive. And yet, it felt like one best values I’ve encountered all year. The forty-seven-dollar glass of Leroux Auxey-Duresses was, by the way, delicious, but when I walked out, it wasn’t what I was thinking about. What stuck was the reductionist impulse at the core of the place: the wine was not cheap and the room was not inexpensive to operate, but every element seemed aligned toward the same goal. Everything reinforced everything else. Nothing was ornamental but everything was beautiful.

And there is also the fact that you could ignore all this intention, grab a seat at the bar, order a seven-dollar Miller High Life, make it a Spaghett for another three bucks, and catch up with an old friend.

You get to decide.

You can find my most recent feature here.

This piece is part of the Reviews section, where I visit restaurants, bars, and drinking establishments and look closely at the cooking, hospitality, and cultural theater of going out.

Reviews, like Friday features, are always free. But if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

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Bistrot Ha is loud. The music pushes right up against the volume of the crowd, and the crowd pushes right back. This place sustains a kind of perfectly managed overflow, a surplus of energy that makes you immediately want to order another drink.

The room is physically small — larger than the cultishly tiny Ha’s Đặc Biệt, the Lower East Side restaurant from owners Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha that already achieved the status of downtown crown jewel — but it still operates with the compressed intensity of a place on the verge of combustion.

We sat three across at the corner of the bar, which to my mind is almost always the best seat in the house. From there you can watch the entire living organism function: Anthony Ha’s kitchen, staffed by only a handful of people, pushing out Viet/French bistro mutations with alarming efficiency while the dining room folds in around itself like an accordion. Nobody appears stressed exactly, but everyone seems locked into the same frenetic rhythm. The energy is less fine dining precision than extremely competent band practice.

The crowd, on the night I was there, skewed heavily toward the kind of people who still know how to have fun in restaurants without making a full content strategy out of it. Fashion people, wine people, hospitality people, a table of New York Times writers tucked into the back, downtown couples sharing cigarettes outside between courses. The room possessed the loose confidence of a place already canonized within the cultural class, but not yet flattened into a mandatory stop for finance guys who get their restaurant recommendations from TikTok. Bistrot Ha has already become one of the most critically successful openings in the city, but somehow still feels more beloved than contrived.

Part of that feeling comes from the fact that the restaurant allows enthusiasm to remain visible. Before we were seated, the host greeted us with a splash of German pét-nat. When I asked what it was, he admitted, smiling, that he wasn’t entirely sure how to pronounce the grape — “sch…something.” “Scheurebe!” I replied, perhaps too eagerly. For those who do not spend their free time thinking about obscure aromatic German varieties, Scheurebe makes highly perfumed wines full of grapefruit, herbs, tropical fruit and electric acidity; the sort of wine natural wine bars love because it feels simultaneously nerdy, unserious, drinkable and usually affordable. We exchanged a few quick thoughts about it before he had to greet the next arrival. The moment lasted only a few seconds, but it clarified something important about the restaurant’s overall proposition. At Bistrot Ha, hospitality arrives slightly ahead of mastery. The wine list is clearly assembled by people with serious taste, but what’s more immediately apparent is that everyone here seems genuinely psyched on what they’re serving.

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That same improvisational swagger carries into the food. Nothing here tastes remotely dialed down. Contemporary downtown restaurant cooking has spent the last decade flirting with restraint, elegance, tiny portions arranged with architectural severity. Bistrot Ha appears to have looked at all this, shrugged, and decided that if a little fish sauce is good then an irresponsible amount might be even better.

The bartender, a tall and permanently cheerful presence working the corner closest to the door, joked while walking us through the cocktails that every dish on the menu contains fish sauce in some form, so they felt obligated to sneak it into a drink as well. The Ha’s Martini — gin, impossibly cold, garnished with a small pickled oyster — initially drinks cleaner than expected, almost delicate, until the oyster arrives afterward carrying a dense saline minerality that rephrases the cocktail retroactively. It eschews the muddy oxidized flavors of olive-brine that overtake many dirty martinis in favor of something sharper, colder, more tidal.

The menu itself plays a game of semantic camouflage. Dishes are described through ingredient fragments rather than recognizable forms, so that flavors arrive first as surprise and only later as recognition. A plate of asparagus appeared over a surprisingly bright, chopped egg sauce that, at first bite, revealed itself as a quirked-up take on gribiche; bright enough with vinegar to make the whole plate hum electrically. Smoky, pickled mussels scattered over the top kept interrupting the richness in brief jolts of marine funk. The bartender mentioned that the dish had only recently replaced the restaurant’s oft-lauded vertically arranged leeks vinaigrette, a reminder that the menu is in constant evolution.

Fried yuba stuffed with pork, shrimp, and cabbage arrived under the vague disguise of a tofu dish, only to immediately trigger the deep sensory memory of an exceptionally elegant Vietnamese egg roll. The yuba shattered with unbelievable crispness before collapsing into sweet-savory nuoc mam. Elsewhere, fried shrimp arrived beneath a glossy brown sauce whose acid and umami levels appeared calibrated by someone fundamentally unconcerned with moderation. At a certain point it becomes clear that the governing principle of the kitchen is not balance in the classical sense, but escalation. Every flavor, texture, and sensation is nudged just slightly beyond where another restaurant might stop. These dishes are cranked to eleven.

Usually this works beautifully. A peppercorn-crusted pork chop soaking in clam liquor and shrimp paste was probably the strongest dish we ate all night, managing to feel both bistro-ish and slightly deranged. A steak au poivre, meanwhile, arrived under a dense Sichuan-peppercorn-flecked sauce somewhere between the French pepper cream promised on the menu and Chinese-American brown sauce of childhood memory. Here, the kitchen’s tendency toward escalation briefly outran itself; the steak’s brazen savoriness exhausted the palate after a few bites. This particular dish was operating at, maybe, a twelve or thirteen. But strangely, even this felt consistent with the restaurant’s modus operandi. It is pursuing appetite at full blast.

I recognized the wine guy from his old job at Frenchette. He opened us a bottle of Ferme de la Sansonnière “La Lune,” a VdF of Chenin Blanc. In another context, a wine like this — oxidative edges, orchard fruit, wax, acidity held in tension with texture — might command the full intellectual attention of the table. Here it moved through the meal, cooling and resetting the palate against the relentless saturation of fish sauce, vinegar, shellfish and spice. Restaurants like Bistrot Ha, Win Son, and Sunn’s are helping normalize a style of pairing that still seems insane from the perspective of traditional wine culture: natural wines slammed against aggressively savory East and Southeast Asian flavor structures. But the pairing works because both the food and the wine prioritize energy over polish.

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Sadie Mae Burns, who remained in constant motion throughout the evening running food, clearing tables, and working the room, stopped by at one point to say hello and make sure we were taken care of. What struck me was not simply her competence, though there was plenty of that, but the sheer amount of warmth she still seemed capable of generating outward into the room despite the velocity of service around her. Some people possess a genuine gift for making strangers feel welcomed into the momentum of an evening, and Sadie seems to operate almost entirely on that frequency.

By that point the room had entered the wavy part of the evening where everyone seems to be pleasantly absorbed in the charming excesses of dining out. More bottles arriving. More fries than the table could possibly need. The music somehow just a little louder than before. The strange achievement of Bistrot Ha is that it manages to sustain all this energy without making too big a show of it. The place still feels genuinely thrilled to exist. It has not yet sanded down its edges into the defense mechanism of fake refinement. It still feels in process, very confident, occasionally ridiculous, and very much convinced that dinner should be fun.

You leave slightly overfed, slightly overstimulated, and with a ringing in your ears — fully convinced to go out for one more martini.

You can find my most recent feature here.

This piece is part of the Reviews section, where I visit restaurants, bars, and drinking establishments and look closely at the cooking, hospitality, and cultural theater of going out.

Reviews, like Friday features, are always free. But if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

On a recent Friday night in Leeds, New York, we began the evening at Casa Susanna in a small lounge beside a fireplace, drinking unbelievably salty mezcal margaritas and waiting for our table. The room was warm and softly lit, the crowd young and stylish in an unmistakable Upstate-for-the-weekend kind of way—New Yorkers temporarily relocated two hours north in search of air, trees, and modern Mexican cooking.

The first dish to arrive once we were seated was an aguachile negro with scallop crudo, chestnut, and corn tostadas stained black with squid ink. It immediately rearranged my expectations. Small wedges of raw scallop rested in a liquid so dark it looked almost lacquered. The flavor, however, was shockingly bright: a ripping acidity that sharpened the sweetness of the scallop until it felt almost electric. Somewhere in the dish was a green herb I couldn’t identify by flavor or by sight—something sharp and mysteriously aromatic (was it curry leaf?) that gave the chilled broth a bewildering dimensionality.

It’s rare, at least for me, to encounter a flavor combination that feels genuinely unfamiliar. Restaurants often promise novelty but deliver careful variations on things you already understand. This dish did something different. The colors, the textures, the interplay between sweetness, acid, and mystery herb created a moment of pleasant sensory disorientation.

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The cooking comes from chef Éfrén Hernández, whose work has become one of the more interesting culinary stories in the Hudson Valley. Hernández has built a reputation for translating Mexican techniques through the ingredients of the region—corn, vegetables, smoke—while maintaining a level of precision that can be surprisingly difficult to achieve outside major cities.

Part of the surprise came from the setting. The Catskills dining scene has expanded rapidly over the past decade, fueled by the steady migration of city dwellers seeking quieter landscapes and slower weekends. Restaurants have followed them north, many attached to hotels or rural properties that promise a particular kind of pastoral luxury: a beautiful room, a thoughtful cocktail program, maybe a menu that gestures toward the bounty of local farms.

Some are excellent. Others rely more heavily on atmosphere than cooking.

Casa Susanna initially seemed like part of that ecosystem. The dining room hummed with the easy confidence of a place that knows its audience—couples in well-cut denim and expensive sneakers, groups of friends sharing plates and passing phones across the table to photograph them. It had the familiar social energy of a downtown restaurant scene that has simply migrated north for the weekend.

Our server gave us a rundown of the restaurant’s masa program.

With earnest enthusiasm, they delivered a brief lesson in nixtamalization—the ancient process of treating corn with alkaline minerals to unlock its flavor and nutrition. Casa Susanna makes its tortillas and other masa products in-house, starting with dried corn and working forward from there. The explanation was delivered casually, with care and specificity, the way someone might tell you about a favorite record.

It was the first indication that the kitchen was operating with deeper ambitions than the setting might initially suggest.

The tetela with yellow mole, leeks, and puntarelle confirmed it. Tetelas are triangular masa pockets, traditionally griddled and filled, and here the masa itself was the star. This plush corn cake carried the unmistakable depth that comes from proper nixtamalization—the flavor of corn amplified into something nutty, warm, sweet and savory. Inside, a pillowy melted alpine cheese stretched softly between bites. If the crudo was a moment of suspension, the tetela leaned into a kind of romantic comfort, recalling the undeniable pleasures of soft corn and melted cheese.

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Other dishes arrived in steady succession. A beef tartare appeared brightened with herbs and acidity, topped with a tostada slathered in bone marrow aïoli and dusted with fermented cranberry powder. The meat was hand-cut and ate soft and smooth, punctuated by the occasional soft crunch of macadamia nuts—another moment of welcome disorientation.

A plate of castelfranco radicchio and sunflower seeds brought bitterness and crunch to the table, a necessary counterweight to the richer plates surrounding it.

Another absolutely wild corn experience arrived in the form of a sope layered with maitake mushroom and huitlacoche. It carried an earthy, funky depth, sharpened by black garlic and a flash of horseradish. Mushrooms and corn fungus are ingredients that can easily become overwhelming together, but here the dish was restrained—small, concentrated, and just enough for a couple bites each.

And then there was the smoked lamb barbacoa, bathed in a broth of its own braising liquid, and served with house-made corn tortillas and a few grilled and blistered fajita-like accoutrements. I gleefully assembled the perfect taco, thinking about my childhood in central Texas, when the expensive plate of fajitas would sizzle through the dining room on its way to someone else’s table.

What impressed me most was not any single flourish but the consistency of technique across the meal. The cooking at Casa Susanna reads as playful on the surface, but underneath that playfulness is a disciplined attention to balance, texture, and seasoning.

Looking around the room again, it became clear that Casa Susanna had already found its audience. The Catskills have increasingly become an extension of New York City taste culture: a place where the same diners who fill Brooklyn wine bars on Tuesday nights now gather for long weekend meals in converted farmhouses and hotel dining rooms. Restaurants in the region often trade on that migration, offering a carefully calibrated version of rustic luxury.

But country restaurants face structural challenges that city restaurants don’t. Staffing is harder. Business fluctuates with the seasons. Kitchens often aim for charm rather than precision. It is surprisingly difficult to build a restaurant far from a major city that maintains both consistency and ambition.

In this respect, Casa Susanna feels like a miracle.

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The restaurant’s name gestures toward the property’s regional history. The original Casa Susanna was a mid-century retreat in the Catskills that served as a refuge for transgender women and cross-dressers during a time when such spaces were rare and often hidden. Photographs discovered decades later show people cooking, relaxing, and socializing in a rare atmosphere of safety and community. Naming the restaurant after that place situates the project within a longer and stranger lineage of Catskills hospitality.

Chef Hernández’s ambitions in the Hudson Valley appear to be expanding. Hernández is currently reworking the kitchen at Rivertown Lodge in nearby Hudson, transforming the restaurant there into another modern Mexican concept. If Casa Susanna is any indication, that project will be worth watching.

If this level of cooking existed in Manhattan, it would already be notable. That it exists in Leeds, New York makes it genuinely surprising.

By the end of our meal, that sense of surprise hadn’t entirely worn off. Restaurants sometimes promise discovery but rarely deliver it; more often they offer careful variations on things we already know. Casa Susanna, on the other hand, produced several moments that felt legitimately new.

In a dining culture that can sometimes feel predictable, that kind of experience is increasingly rare, and increasingly valuable.