The Strong Buzz

“Cafe Condesa”

July 16, 2006

I’m going to venture a guess here that many of you live in small New York City apartments with tiny kitchens. I am one of those people too. I love my little studio, but it is on the, shall we say, tiny side of small. Anyway, if you have such a small pad, I want you to close your eyes for a moment and imagine turning your cozy little apartment into a restaurant. Imagine cleaning up the raw wood beams, polishing the floors a deep walnut, hanging spare art on the exposed brick walls, and bare amber bulbs from long lean wires. In your reverie, set up about six tables and scan some of your favorite recipe books for some simple dishes from your repertoire to serve for breakfast (croissants, eggs any style), lunch (croque monsieur, a cemita (a big fat sandwich) stuffed with pork, ham, cheese, avocado, tomatoes, and chipotle pepper mayo), and dinner (roasted halibut with asparagus and fingerling potatoes, poached chicken breast with wild rice, chicken confit and brussel sprouts). You imagine you’ll charge reasonable prices for simple plates that are easy to put up, but make a mark with bold clean flavors, and you invite some friends in to help you run the place.

Okay, you can open your eyes now. You’ve just imagined Café Condesa, a snug little café in the West Village that resembles that dream sequence in every detail but the fact that it’s not in your apartment. It’s in a former cell-phone shop the size of an itty bitty studio with a makeshift kitchen fueled not by gas, but by induction heat. And it’s run by a real chef, Luis Arce Mota (sous chef at Jefferson, and formerly of Bouley and Union Square Café) and two of his friends Emir Dupeyron and Enrique Jardines, pals from Mexico City whom he met while working at French Roast. Together, they’ve created a warm and generous neighborhood joint serving a daily dose of wonderful coffee alongside a reasonably priced menu of crowd-pleasing eats.

Harvey, Debbie and I were in last week for dinner and found the place nicely crowded. A few pretty women in summer frocks and flip flops were dining at the long lean food bar, and tables were crowded with friends in overly worn denim and tees drinking wine and beer over dinner. We sat down at a table by the window and ordered a round of beers. When they arrived, I was sad to learn there were no limes in the house to add a tart squeeze. You would think the kitchen might have one lying around for cooking purposes at least, but nope. It seemed odd. I like a nice juicy wedge of lime with a cold beer, especially in the summertime. But cold beers are cold beers and on a humid sticky thunderous night in the city, they did the trick as we cooled down, dried off from the soaking rain and looked over the menu.

The menu at Café Condesa is described as Latin-inflected, which is and is not the case. I’d say it’s more pan-European, based on selection of quite reasonably priced large appetizer-sized plates the chef is serving from his thumbnail-sized kitchen. To start, there’s a goat cheese galette with red peppers and black olives over mache ($7.25), and a petit camembert fondue ($8.75)—which, while quite good (what could be bad about melted cheese)—is really more of a super melty slab of camembert with toasted bread than a creamy, silky fondue over a flame. There’s also a monster sized cobb salad ($8.25) loaded up with Cabrales, bacon, onions, avocado and chicken breast, and another salad I have not seen on a menu since the days of shoulder pads and leg warmers—baby spinach with portobello mushrooms and shaved Parmesan in a classic balsamic vinaigrette. While dated, it was quite good. For pasta, we had a heaping bowl of fresh house-made fettucini (the chef made pasta at Union Square) tangled up with wild mushrooms, shaved manchego and broccoli rabe ($8.25), a fine dish, though the sauce was a bit too creamy, and in need of better seasoning (read: salt and pepper please).

But pitch perfect seasoning and nice clean bold flavors did show up in the Latin American influenced dishes on the menu. There’s a bright and fresh tomato salsa with ripe avocado puree with tomatillo that tops off a seared filet of glossy pink salmon ($10.25), and a vibrant chimicchuri swiped over a juicy pink lamb chop (listed rather comically on the menu as “rack of lamb” for $12.95) with meaty roasted wild mushrooms and a buttery fingerling puree the texture of heavy poured cream. We also liked the Albodingas (meatballs, $9.50), a wonderful nod to Spain, that were fiercely seasoned with fresh herbs and quite moist and fluffy, but they were served over a rice pilaf that had seen better days. The rice dish, I believe, was left in the oven for about an hour too long so that the rice, which seemed to have once been silky, was now overcooked and crunchy from being heat-blasted. And to top it off, the meatballs were just dabbed with a scant bit of tomato sauce that made the dish look like a sad assembly of leftovers. These meatballs were quite good and they deserve a little more sauce and a bed of rice that is cared for a bit more on the pickup.

We were quite stuffed at this point, with the several rounds of beers and food and all, and after dinner, we decided to walk off our meal with a stroll home through the damp and steamy streets of the Village. As we walked along, I thought about the restaurant and the food, as I am prone to do after a meal, and most all times, other than when I am thinking about things like how we are going to rescue the planet and our world from its current state.

I liked the energy and the soul of Café Condesa. It is sweet in a bohemian chic sort of way, and I think the owners have done a wonderful job of creating a space that offers the neighborhood a sweet spot to gather all day long for café con leche, a bagel, a nice fat cemita, a bowl of fresh pasta, or a great little lamb chop. The menu seems a bit ambling and not focused enough in some ways, which I think could strengthen the concept. At a place named for La Condesa, an artsy neighborhood in Mexico City, I would imagine seeing more Mexican fare on the menu, not a bowl of fettucini and a Portobello mushroom salad. But conceptual issues aside, the food is reasonably priced, and is simple and enjoyable. It’s the sort of food I might cook at home for friends in my tiny little apartment, if I closed my eyes and imagined setting a table and turning on the stove and cooking. But it’s too hot to cook.

Café Condesa is located at 183 West 10th Street, 212-352-0050.

Andrea Strong