Getting seated at Cosme takes some resolve. It’s the undisputed opening of the season, and reservations are famously hard to come by. The phalanx of hosts stare at seating charts on their iPads with the grim, protracted confusion of airline check-in agents. The main dining room is past a long wall of curious Old World wines—the restaurant may be Mexican, but that’s no excuse for a margarita. Seemingly everyone has ordered the chef Enrique Olvera’s signature “burrata and weeds” dish, and, like that twenty-four-dollar appetizer, they ooze money. Should Cosme need a mascot, the man at the next table will do, in his fedora and mock turtleneck, looking like an angel investor on “Silicon Valley” and asking for another round of premium-tequila shots. If you build an expensive place in the Flatiron district, he will come.
That Olvera has made such a scene must not detract from his food, which is uniformly better than the crowd it draws. His restaurant in Mexico City, Pujol, is thought to be one of the world’s best, and the smoked raw sepia will show you why: a tangle of translucent, slivered strands, tossed with the simplest of tomato salsas. The taste of the ocean announces itself as a zephyr, not a squall. The octopus cocktail is an agreeably blunt counterpoint, a lilac-colored soup with the consistency of drinkable yogurt, in which purple and blue corn and charred avocado bob alongside tentacled slices on the right side of chewy.
Cosme falls for the trend of the half-empty oversized plate, now an accepted shorthand for seriousness in the restaurant world. So be it. The small dishes that begin the meal are better anyhow, like the uni tostada, which demands to be passed around the group in traditional dorm-room fashion. It is mysteriously funky and strangely gelatinous. That’s the bone marrow, an ingenious marriage of earth and sea, all mellowed out with a smear of avocado. One bite is perfect, and enough. Another winner, and a guarantee that you’ll never look at Sabra the same way again, is the bean salad, actually a purée drizzled with habanero vinaigrette. There’s cucumber in the dressing, too, prepared the way all vegetables should be, which is charred to the point of somehow tasting like bacon. But, if you’ve paid any attention to the hype, the entire endeavor might be a very delicious excuse for dessert: a corn-husk meringue with its own hashtag, possessed of an intensely milky taste from the mousse of mascarpone, cream, and corn purée that spills out like lava from its core. All is forgiven. Even the iPads. ♦
Open daily for dinner. Plates $12-$35.
