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Fine dining restaurant · Chinatown
"Before opening Corima, in a moody, rustic space on the bottom edge of the Lower East Side, the chef Fidel Caballero cooked at some of the city’s most enjoyably weird and cerebral restaurants, including a residency at Rhodora and a tenure at (R.I.P., sigh) Contra, the thimble-size, Michelin-starred downtown tasting-menu restaurant that closed late last year after a decade of service. Caballero, who grew up between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, just over the Mexican border, builds his menu on a foundation of northern Mexican ingredients and techniques—green chilis, flour tortillas, plenty of cheese. Corima is named for korima, a principle of communality central to the way of life of the Tarahumara people, who are indigenous to the Mexican state of Chihuahua. But, as you might expect from Caballero’s C.V., he pulls in elements that take the restaurant well beyond any simplistic category of “Mexican food”: a bit of France, a bit of China, a whole heck of a lot of Japan. Even the tortillas get a cheffy spin. Unconventionally, Caballero makes his with butter, rather than animal fat or oil, and adds a bit of sourdough starter for flavor. The tortillas are cooked one at a time over the back of an inverted wok; a kitchen torch is used to char the exposed face to an ideal level of blistery singe. They run nine dollars apiece (why are other tortillas so inexpensive, anyway?) and are served with a smear of softened, cultured butter, colored umber-orange with recado negro, a Yucatec seasoning blend made from charred chilis and spices." - Helen Rosner
