Restaurant Review: Corima | The New Yorker
"In a moody, rustic space on the bottom edge of the Lower East Side, I encountered Fidel Caballero’s ambitious restaurant built on northern Mexican ingredients—green chiles, flour tortillas, plenty of cheese—while drawing freely from French, Chinese, and, especially, Japanese techniques. The name references korima, a Tarahumara principle of communality, and Caballero’s background (raised between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, with stints at Rhodora and Contra) informs the food’s hybrid sensibility. The tortillas are attention-grabbing: made with butter and a bit of sourdough starter, cooked one at a time over the back of an inverted wok and finished with a torch, served with softened cultured butter colored by recado negro, and sold for nine dollars apiece. What first hooked me was an enormous, jewel-like seasonal sashimi platter (now often eighty-sixed), and when it wasn’t available I loved the hiramasa crudo—thick yellow-jack slices layered with crunchy celtuce and dressed with olive oil, soy, a husk-cherry salsa, and a herb-sesame-chicharrón dust like a Mexican furikake. The kitchen excels at coaxing deep, slow-cooked textures: ayacote beans in a whey-based, chili-spiced broth topped with house headcheese; duck enmoladas of long-braised dark meat in a black-garlic mole wrapped in an amaranth tortilla and topped with an airy “cotija foam.” The menu also flirts with obscure regional ingredients (chintixtle, chicatanas) and playful contrasts—a blue-corn quesadilla with asadero, huitlacoche, and shaved truffle; a bright shrimp aguachile marinated in rhubarb and hibiscus with shiso and Japanese cherry-blossom notes. Cocktails by Sam Geller skew bright and crisp (a cilantro-blended Tequila Verde Highball and the surprisingly effective Uni Gin Sour). You can book à-la-carte up front or a two-hour tasting menu in the back for $98; I found the tasting occasionally brilliant (a nixtamalized daikon with fava stems and green aguachile foam) but overall haphazard and uneven, with lukewarm or bewildering courses and service issues that left even the miraculous tortillas arriving cold—so for now I recommend sticking to the à-la-carte side of the room." - Helen Rosner
