Finally, at Mena, Victoria Blamey Gets a Restaurant That Fits Her Talent

Not each nice chef cooks in an excellent restaurant. Some by no means do.

Till she opened Mena in January, Victoria Blamey was in all probability New York Metropolis’s main instance of a chef who was higher than the eating places that employed her. With Mena, she lastly has an excellent restaurant. As a result of she’s an proprietor and since she doesn’t need to tailor her cooking to anyone’s preconceived notions, as she did in her final two jobs, she is making meals that’s really her personal — it doesn’t look or style like anything within the metropolis.

Ms. Blamey made her repute at Chumley’s, a reconstructed speakeasy whose eating room was adorned with jackets of books by long-dead Greenwich Village writers; to anybody who ate there, it was apparent that Ms. Blamey’s cooking was extra attention-grabbing than a lot of these books; even her cheeseburger was in all probability essentially the most soigné cheeseburger within the metropolis.

Her subsequent job, at Gotham Bar and Grill, was in all probability doomed from the beginning. She went there to interchange Alfred Portale, who had been the chef for greater than 30 years — with nice success and acclaim for many of them, though the returns had been diminishing for a while when Ms. Blamey arrived. The regulars, a fiercely loyal however shrinking group, clung to his menu like a life raft, and rebelled when Ms. Blamey retired it. On the identical time, some youthful diners, drawn in by her repute, had been mystified by the formal service rituals and the Reagan-era inside design. Throughout her 10 months there, consuming at Gotham was like going to a marriage the place the bride’s household and the groom’s household aren’t talking.

At Mena, in TriBeCa, she has the clean slate she wants. That doesn’t imply she’s ranging from nothing. A number of dishes are reworkings of earlier concepts, just like the bowl of lentils beneath mushroom chips. Gilded with rooster fats, this made an intense topping for braised rabbit at Gotham. Now it’s by itself. The lentils style distinctly of shiitakes and tomatoes, and extra distantly of golden duck-skin crackling.

So many paper-thin slices of fried king trumpet mushrooms are piled up on prime that at the beginning it seems as in the event that they’re the one factor within the bowl. A complete bowl of Mena’s mushroom chips is one thing to want for if you lay your head on the pillow at evening. Seasoned frivolously with vadouvan, they create flavors that linger. That is one in every of Ms. Blamey’s expertise, upsetting tastes that play on the palate longer than you count on.

There’s that basic dream about discovering that an residence has a spare room no person has ever observed; Ms. Blamey finds new rooms inside basic dishes. She enlarges them.

One other excessive level at Gotham was the scallop ceviche in a leche de tigre constructed from recent corn. Ms. Blamey picks up the thought at Mena and expands on it, with fermented winter squash rather than the corn. She loses the summery sweetness of corn, however the squash broth has larger depth and an extended, extra complicated end, which is amplified by shrimp paste. The scallops, chilly and ivory white, are rolled in a sort of mud of pickled chiles and seaweed flakes. The flavors transfer out, radiate and converge.

Ms. Blamey’s upbringing in Santiago, Chile, which knowledgeable a couple of dishes at her earlier eating places, is extra central to Mena’s menu. Steamed Maine mussels are folded beneath charred Murdoc cabbage in a darkish discount constructed from caramelized onions and extra mussels, this batch dehydrated in homage to a standard Chilean method. The dish exhibits how good Ms. Blamey could be when she begins with underestimated substances like cabbages and onion and decides to shoot the works.

Locro, a stew of largely pre-Columbian greens that seems in virtually infinite permutations up and down the Andes, is ready at Mena in a kind each rustic and opulent on the identical time. The stew is wealthy with potatoes, quinoa and lumps of snow crab; tiny white peas from the Carolina Sea Islands, virtually impossibly creamy, give it a considerable weight.

However there are additionally dishes that appear to have nothing to do with Chile — as an example, a chou farci. It isn’t the standard steaming bundle of cabbage and meat however a type of round napoleon made by sandwiching leaves of cabbage and different greens between layers of stunningly flavorful, lime-scented scallop mousse that has attained the feathery solidity of panna cotta. Ringed by a froth of vin jaune sauce, it performs like a misplaced basic of nouvelle delicacies.

Early in her profession, Ms. Blamey made a degree of working for cooks who had been dedicated to technical innovation, together with Wylie Dufresne, Paul Liebrandt and Matthew Lightner. However she isn’t infatuated with method for its personal sake, and he or she appears to know the worth of low-tech house cooking.

In reality, she has a uncommon capability to deliver the 2 collectively. She seasons a smooth, savory blood sausage with onions and spices, surrounds it with potato purée and finishes it with a creamy au poivre sauce. The flavors could recommend a lace-curtain bistro in Lyon, however the ethereal lightness of the potatoes says Mena, and solely Mena.

To get to Mena, you head beneath Canal Avenue and search for Cortlandt Alley. You’ll in all probability understand it if you see it as a result of it’s been in virtually each film that wanted a backdrop of previous, gritty, harmful New York.

Inside, the restaurant has some disco-era curves and a few Central European coffeehouse class, and lots of sq. yards of home windows. Loads of the seating is at midnight-blue banquettes and cubicles. Framed pictures on one wall present the stays of a home from which entire sections have been eliminated. It’s the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, the Chilean American artist who altered buildings with chain saws, at some threat to their structural integrity and his personal security.

The room is energetic and cozy sufficient that you could be wish to sit for hours. However not perpetually — the fixed-price menu is supposed to be a meal, not a marathon. For $125 you get three savory dishes and dessert. Over my three meals, the menu supplied a number of choices for each course besides the final; dessert was all the time a Pavlova with white slabs of meringue stacked, just like the terraces of Fallingwater, over passion-fruit pulp, citrus curd — key lime, Meyer lemon, no matter was in season that week — and angel-hair squash cooked in sugar syrup.

Not having a alternative of dessert struck me as a minor weak point till I recalled what number of tasting menus I’ve eaten just lately that value round $125, or extra, with nearly no choices at any level and much fewer discoveries and adventures alongside the way in which.

That final level is the place Mena overshadows so many different costly eating places which have opened within the metropolis over the previous few years. A protected conservatism has crept into high-end eating in Manhattan just lately. Caviar will seem within the first course, truffles might be wheeled out, both sea urchin or lobster is nearly assured. Ms. Blamey’s substances make an impression not due to their associations with luxurious however as a result of she is aware of tips on how to use them, from the candy and chewy muscle tissues of the Atlantic surf clam to the dense, sweet-sour flesh of roasted Andean oca.

Mena is right here to remind us, and never a minute too quickly, that if you cost that sort of cash for dinner in New York Metropolis, originality is meant to be a part of the deal.