Restaurant Review: Real-Deal Eccentricity, at Oti | The New Yorker

"You'll know you've arrived at a modest Romanian-ish restaurant on the Lower East Side when you see the monster on the window (and on the menu, and the wall): a saffron-hued cartoon blob of a face capped with gray tasselled horns and a purple eggplant for a nose. Elyas Popa, the Romanian-born proprietor and chef, has run Oti in one form or another for about five years—first as a catering business, then as pop-ups and residencies—and in September it became a proper restaurant serving his artsy-cheffy riffs on the food of his childhood, which draws on Balkan, Ottoman, and Mediterranean influences: soft cheeses, spiced meats, mountains of fresh green herbs, and a vivid tradition of pickling and curing. In the tiny space the manager and co-owner, Dania Kim, walked me through a brief menu of three entrée-size plates and five smaller ones, explaining pairings like “broken burrata” (Romanian Telemea dressed in edible flowers) beside a pepper-and-eggplant zacuscă dip, or pickled-mushroom toast topped with char-blackened pickled hot peppers. Under Kim’s direction I paired the daily special—plump mussels cooked in a tomato-beer broth—with a bowl of mămăligă shot through with Parmesan, a combination that somehow balanced two different kinds of rich and salty textures into a mutually constructive weirdness; a plate of three lamb-and-beef meatballs topped with mustard mellowed by a swirl of miso was nicely complemented by pickled grapes, pike-sharp with apple-cider vinegar and cinnamon, clever and bizarre. Oti feels idiosyncratic without being art-directed—real-deal eccentricity in a scrappy operation held together by Popa’s sheer creative tenacity; occasional inconsistency doesn’t erase the sense that it’s ambitious and maybe on the cusp of becoming something really, really great. There’s no dessert menu, but the meal concludes with a precisely arranged rainbow of gummy bears (one bear in each color). (Dishes $9–$21.)" - Helen Rosner