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Cocina Consuelo, a restaurant in Hamilton Heights that opened in August, comprises four hundred square feet jam-packed with color and life. A blue-painted wooden banquette, like a church pew or a bench in a train station, runs against a wall that is summer-corn yellow; the tiles around the bar are a deep pond green. In the back of the room is a bar, which is also the kitchen; at the front, just inside a great casement window that fills the front wall, is a spinet piano made of blond wood and confettied with stickers. You could fit another table or two in that space instead—in such a tiny restaurant, a few more seats would be a meaningful increase—but then, well, there wouldn’t be a piano, or the books and plants that sit along its top, or the sheaf of menus resting above the keys on the music stand. On a recent evening, the window was open to the fall breeze, and music and conversation spilled out onto the street. At one point, the chef, Karina Garcia, rushed up to a table to sweep a baby into her arms, dancing with him to trance-y German electronica as his parents cheered them on. No one actually sat down and played the piano on either of my visits, but there was a feeling in the air that, at any moment, someone might.
The drinks menu includes a revelatory combo of espresso and pineapple juice over ice.
Tortitas de calabaza, or zucchini cakes.
The restaurant is the joint project of Garcia and her husband, Lalo Rodriguez. The two met while working at a now-closed Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side; Garcia went on to work in the front of the house at Eleven Madison Park, while Rodriguez put in time at Cosme. Like many restaurant people put out of work during the pandemic, the couple turned to their own creativity to get by, selling tacos out of their then apartment in Harlem. That venture evolved into a supper club, also called Cocina Consuelo, serving food rooted in Rodriguez’s childhood in Puebla, Mexico. It’s been wonderful, over the past few years, to see scrappy projects from that uncertain era—among them Wizard Hat Pizza, the taqueria Border Town, and the bakery L’Appartement 4F—live on and form a thriving new generation of New York City food culture.
A batch of tortitas.
The chef Karina Garcia.
Cocina Consuelo serves a daytime meal (through 2 P.M.) and then reopens for dinner. By day, there’s excellent coffee—a cinnamon-scented café de olla; a revelatory combo of espresso and pineapple juice over ice—and a menu that’s both brief and serious. Two small half-moon quesadillas are showcases for a smoky, stewy tinga made not with shredded chicken or pork but with braised hibiscus flowers, which have a tender, meaty texture and a gentle astringency. Picaditas—the soft, savory corn cakes sometimes known as sopes—are piled up with green chorizo, homemade and herbaceous, under a mountain of tangy purple onion and fresh white cheese. A dish understatedly called “grilled cheese” has undeniable star power: made on, of all things, a croissant, it features tangy orange cheddar and is squashed on a griddle until the cheese and pastry are crisp. It’s liberally spread with a similarly sharp-textured salsa macha, a Veracruzan condiment akin to chile crunch, made with toasted hot peppers, garlic, and toasted pepitas and sesame seeds.
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In the evening, the lights go down, and that communal coffee-shop energy transmutes into something a little sexier. A tart, jalapeño-spiked Caesar dressing coats long, pale leaves of bitter endive that beg to be picked up with the fingertips and eaten, lustily, out of hand. A pair of bright-red peppers, stuffed with tangy tuna confit and draped in tender rings of soft-cooked onion, are plated leaning against one another, almost romantically. A large marrow bone, halved lengthwise and roasted, is topped with tender beef birria, which Garcia slow-cooks for more than fifteen hours, and a creamy salsa roja. The marrow, like all marrow, is obscene in its richness; the birria, like the best birria, has a dark, curvaceous intensity. Eaten together, on a warm masa tortilla , the marrow and the birria nearly overwhelm each other, but both are kept just in balance by the snap of pickled onion and the sharp bite of cilantro. Less Instagrammable, but perhaps even more wonderful, is a night-dark puddle of mole negro. The sauce, ladled over a confited leg of duck and swashed with crema, is enrapturing as quicksand, luxuriously smooth and complex, with a welcome edge of bitterness. With their elegant plating and sophisticated flavors, these dishes wouldn’t feel out of place at a ritzy downtown dining room, but they fit in just as seamlessly here, in Cocina Consuelo’s multicolored space, surrounded by personal touches in a room full of music. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
