This summer, Twitter was set ablaze by a controversial recipe for guacamole that called for green peas. At the Black Ant, in the East Village, the house guacamole varies; it has been studded with garbanzo beans, fried corn, orange slices, jicama, radishes, and even cheese. But it is always finished with ants. The garnish, to be precise, is sal de hormiga, or salt with ground-up chicatanas—large, winged leaf-cutter ants, harvested once a year, in the Mexican region of Oaxaca. The ants taste somewhere between nutty and buttery, with a chemical tang, and lend the salt a bit of umami. There are no peas in sight at the Black Ant, where unusual ingredients are esteemed and insects are the crown jewels.
Unless you know the Spanish word chapulín, you may not realize that the shrimp tacos are battered and fried in a crust of grasshoppers, creating a deliciously recursive arthropod. On the tlayuda, a crispy corn tortilla topped, like a small pizza, with black beans and soft cheese, the sautéed grasshoppers come whole and taste exquisitely of chili and lime. Pluck one from its lily pad of avocado cream, pop it in your mouth, and don’t forget to chew, lest any legs stick in your throat.
You might have to Google some Nahuatl words to navigate the menu, but the more unusual the dish, the better. If it sounds familiar—like beet salad or miso black cod—you can probably skip it. One evening, a salad arrived with a pile of lettuce leaves, soupy with too-sweet dressing, very few beets, and two dollops of mysteriously tangless whipped goat cheese. An exception to this rule is the short rib, which swims in mole chichilo, a unique execution of the complex, earthy sauce that, unlike a more common mole negro, does not include chocolate but instead relies on blackened dried chilis for a rich, complex char.
Mole, insects, and corn are all Oaxacan staples, and the abstract-expressionist streaks and dots of sauce on the plates here are mere diversions from what is really a loving homage to that Mecca of Mexican cuisine. On its Web site, the restaurant seems to delight in the cross-cultural gross-out potential, and leans a little too heavily on Surrealist signposts like Dali and Buñuel, with a nice nod to the former’s repulsive ants. The result is a bit of a mixed message: with the exception of a giant multicolored ant painted on the back wall of the dining room, the bugs at the Black Ant are nothing to be afraid of. ♦
Open weekdays for dinner and weekends for brunch and dinner. Entrées $19-$26.
