Manhattan Raw - Part One

Manhattan Skyline & Seafood Dishes - Tasting Table

I've been writing this blog for 16 years now and haven't really done much on New York City.  Sure, I've touched on it here and there: oysters grown around the Greater New York area, New York oysterman & abolitionist Thomas Downing, and of course the infamous Long Island Blue Point.  However, I've never done a proper piece on the NYC seafood scene.  And, I have to be honest, that's no accident.  NYC is really intimidating, in more ways than one.  For my purposes, the panoply of potential seafood profiles is simply overwhelming.  New York is a city where you can literally get anything you want at any time of day.  3am döner kebab delivery - check.  Thursday night Indigenous-American cuisine pop-up - check.  Sunday Italian bomboloni or Chinese bolo bao - check and check.

By the numbers, New York's five boroughs combined have over 25,000 eateries, restaurants, or food retailers.  That's an insane amount.  Manhattan alone accounts for about 9,500.  And of those 9,500, over 350 are self-proclaimed seafood establishments.  Just to cover Manhattan, that's two seafood meals a day, every day, for six months.  This doesn't even account for the random Irish pub with incredible fish & chips or obscure Dominican spot with killer camarones al ajillo.  Daunting, to say the least.  But with a recent three-day work trip, I decided it was finally time to navigate NYC's vast culinary waters. 

Aguachile del Día at Amá

So, where to begin?  "Seafood" is too broad for New York City, with all the aforementioned possiblities and more.  What if I narrowed it down to only crawfish boils or crab houses?  Maybe just establishments known for their respective seafood stews like chowder, tom yum, bouillabaisse, caldeirada, or gumbo.  Seafood-focused fine dining would be fun, right?  My employer is cool, but a few $300 Le Bernardin meals in two days and I'd have some 'splaining to do.  How about Italian-American clam houses or only retail seafood markets?  The possibilities were still many, but you can see the direction I was heading.  At the same time, I'd dined at Amá, an upscale Mexican eatery in Philadelphia, a few weeks prior to my trip.  They do seasonal ceviche and aguachile specials, and having enjoyed a few, I knew exactly how I wanted to explore NYC's seafood scene.

Raw seafood preparations span both history and the globe, and people around the world have likely been pairing raw fish and shellfish with various available ingredients for millennia.  Narrowing my NYC trip to just raw, or raw-ish, seafood preparations would definitely help.  But still, so many possiblities ranging from Tahitian poisson cru to components of a 'seacuterie' board.  This is where the Amá experience and inspiration really came in.  I've written about ceviche quite a few times before, or ceviche-esque dishes.  Cocteles, salads, tartares, tiraditos.  Whatever you want to call them, they're delectable.  Fresh, raw seafood that's dressed or lightly cured in acid & salt and served with any combination of other ingredients, often capsicums and alliums.  No catch-all name exists for these, and each variation has its own nuance and history.  In the States, ceviche is arguably most popular, and we've come to loosely group similar perparations under this title.  You'll even see things like "Kokoda: Fiji's version of ceviche" on menus.  Either way, I was excited for this to be my Manhattan seafood focus.  I think the late, great Ol' Dirty Bastard said it best — "oh baby I like it raw..."  And with only a few 'ceviche o'clocks' in my work trip, I had to 'seas the day' wisely.  Vamos! 

Kausa - Peruvian Restaurant & Pisco Bar
   

Where better to start than with the most widely acknowledged founding father of ceviche, Peruvian cuisine.  Hell, it's even got UNESCO recognition.  I often half joke about desperately wanting a Peruvian pollo a la brasa place somewhere in the suburbs.  It would kill it, especially with the anti-seed-oil, crunchy, granola crowd.  I realized, though, that while I say I miss the charcoal chicken and yucca fries, it's really just the aji amarillo sauce that I miss most.  I'd mainline that shit if I could.  It's incorporated in practically every Peruvian dish, ceviche included.  I even grew some aji peppers in my garden this year, but that's for another blog post 😉.
   

Anyway, after a lengthy work conference day in Midtown, I scrambled over to Hell's Kitchen for an 8pm reservation with a friend.  Opened right after the pandemic, Kausa sits on a bustling section of 9th Avenue between West 50th and 51st Streets, catering to locals and theatergoers alike.  It's named after the traditional Peruvian dish causa, a sort of mashed potato and potato salad hybrid with, you guessed it, aji amarillo.  There's a vibrant Latino bistro & bar vibe to the whole place.  Warm, neon blue lighting illuminates gold ornamentation and murals of sweeping Andean landscapes.  A mashup of hip hop and Huayno music is on full blast.  Peruvian Liga 1 soccer matches are on every TV.  And the bar is buzzing with pisco sours flowing freely.  The staff were as lovely and welcoming as could be, too.  But, if I'm being honest, there were a few moments I felt I wasn't cool enough to be there.  That could also be said of me and the entirety of Manhattan, though.      

We ordered a few cervezas, then a rotisserie chicken and some yucca fries.  Both were well done and delicious.  The ceviche mixto, however, was top notch.  Shrimp, squid, octopus, and corvina lightly cured in a savory, citrus-forward leche de tigre and topped with red onion, cilantro, and sweet potato.  Simple yet satisfying in the best ways.  My favorite part of a Peruvian ceviche is always the choclos and canchas, adding a wonderful textural complement and contrast in each bite.  Classics are classics for a reason, and Kausa's ceviche mixto is a perfect demonstration of why.  I highly recommend.  And don't worry, I asked for plenty of aji amarillo on the side, and suggest you do too.    

Los Mariscos - Tacos, Ceviches, Cocteles

I have no data to back this up, but it feels like Mexican eateries account for the second most common iteration of ceviche-esque dishes we see in the States..  Almejas chocolatas, tostadas de atun, vuelve la vida.  Mexico really celebrates its mariscos.  Much respect and love to Colombian, Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, Panamanian, and many other ceviche-making cuisines; too much to cover in too little time, unfortunately.  Also, the inspiration for this whole NYC exploration came from a Mexican meal I'd had in Philadelphia, so you know I had to check one out in Manhattan.  Most importantly, I was looking for a Mexican regional cousin of ceviche, Sinaloa's aguachile. 

Modern-day aguachile is typically a mix of spicy, green peppers blended with salt, lime juice, and water into a thin, verdant sauce; hence the translation to chile water.  It's then poured over raw shrimp or fish and served right away.  The key differentiation between ceviche and aguachile is the cure on the protein, or lack thereof.  Ceviche often comes with cured or even cooked seafood, while aguachile is almost always raw seafood with the sauce poured over and served immediately.  This creates an important textural distinction between the dishes.  Curiously, though, aguachile actually originated in Sinaloa's Sierra Madre mountains with wild game, not on the coast with seafood.  Pre-Colombian peoples would sun-dry meats like venison and javelina for preservation, then reconstitute them with a mash-up of salt, water, and wild chiltepín peppers to eat.  This was adopted by Spanish ranchers and vaqueros, bringing it up to the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Nobody is quite sure exactly how or when, but this practice was popularized with raw seafood in coastal Sinaloa some time in the mid-20th century.  Global familiarity with shrimp aguachile really didn't take hold until the early 2000s, and now it's a menu staple on practically every marisquería.      

My research brought me to NYC's Meatpacking District and the cavernous labyrinth that is Chelsea Market.  Somewhere amongst the narrow corridors, random staircases, and oddly connected spaces sits Los Mariscos.  Opened in 2016, Los Mariscos aims to transplant the seafood shack culture of Baja California to downtown Manhattan, and in all ways succeeds.  The tight space is full of bright, beachside colors with surfboards, fishing rods, Mexican beer signs, and picnic tables.  Staff are shucking oysters, hand-squeezing lime juice, and griddling tortillas all to order while mariachi music blares.  I may have felt out of place at Kausa, but I most certainly felt right a home at Los Mariscos.    



I had limited time with my train home departing in an hour, so I got right into it.  "One aguachile de camarón and a Coca-Cola, por favor."  I sipped my Mexi-Coke while watching the raw-bar staff freshly blend my aguachile and plate it in a show-stopper molcajete.  Served with sliced red onion, Tajín-dressed cucumbers, and tostadas on the side, it was delightful.  The shrimp were fresh and snappy, the cucumbers and onion refreshing, and the sauce was spot on.  Bright, acidic, and bracingly spicy.  It kind of reminded me of Andy Capp's Hot Fries as a kid.  Not in taste or texture of course, but in heat and addictiveness.  You know, one of those foods that once you stop eating, your mouth is on fire.  But as long as you keep eating, the heat is kept at bay, at least for a while.  Spice and all, it was great.  Even after the shrimp and tostadas were gone, I was literally crunching up saltine crackers and dumping them into the aguachile to eat, like a soup or chowder.  10 out of 10, Los Mariscos.  Well done.

Kalye - Filipino Street Food

I'd never had Filipino food until I moved to the Bay Area in 2010.  The past decade has seen a surge in Filipino restaurants throughout Philadelphia, and the States in general.  But when I was a kid, it simply wasn't around, at least where I lived in Chester County.  Better late than never, and I've been regularly enjoying pancit, sisig, lumpia, and more ever since.  Filipino cuisine has also been quietly simmering beneath American mainstream food culture for some time now, with many saying it's the next "big thing."  It's a delicate subject with a long, sordid history steeped in modern colonialism, inequity, and appropriation.  That's for a whole other blog post, though.  What I can say is that Filipino food is delicious and entirely deserving of national recognition.  It checks all the sweet, sour, spicy, salty, pickled, fermented, intensely flavored boxes that Americans increasingly want in their meals.  It's also rooted in a singular culture, something I very much welcome amid so many co-opted Asian fusion restaurants popping up everywhere.  And for my NYC trip, I was focused on finding one Filipino dish in particular: kinilaw.   

Kinilaw is a fresh raw seafood preparation with a mix of acid, salt, and local ingredients like ginger and alliums.  Like ceviche and aguachile, kinilaw has its own unique history and origins.  Archaeological records show evidence of indigenous Filipino communities making variations at least 1,000 years ago.  The name actually stems from the Cebuano word kilaw, meaning "to eat raw."  One of the primary distinctions between ceviches or aguachiles and kinilaw is the type of acid used.  While ceviche draws from an array of citrus or passion fruits, kinilaw is traditionally and typically made with native Filipino acids like coconut vinegar or palm vinegar. 

For my very first kinilaw experience,  I landed on the Lower East Side's Kalye.  Tucked into the eclectic and immigrant-focused neighborhood, Kalye was opened in late 2022 with the goal of creating both a Filipino street food restaurant and community gathering space.  It's packed with Filipino art, media, and ephemera paired with shoutouts to Manila street culture like rattan furniture and sari-sari displays.  Kalye is even the Tagalog word for "street." The whole place has a certain buzz about it that you immediately feel.  If you don't, have a few of their calamansi or pandan cocktails and you definitely will.  Menu-wise, they've got it all: ube halo-halo, sinigang, even a four person feast known as a boodle fight.  All sounded great, but I was there for the kinilaw.  Also, note the parenthesized "tuna ceviche" on their menu right next to kinilaw.  Got to know your market, I suppose. 
  

It was happy hour, so we ordered a few half-priced small plates: lumpia, ube beef sliders, and some charred okra.  All quite tasty, especially the okra with some sort of salt & vinegar seasoning.  A smaller portion of their kinilaw is always available as an HH special, but I wanted the full experience.  It was a satisfying mix of cubed tuna, chiles, cucumber, and red onion, garnished with grape tomatoes and julienned papaya.  The biggest difference between this dish and the other raw seafood preparations I'd had was the aroma.  The heat and crispness of the dish were similar, but it had an almost funky nose and tang to it.  Ginger was notably forward, and there was a sort of fermented sweetness.  Staff were scurrying around a very busy happy hour, so I didn't have the chance to ask about specific ingredients.  But the difference must have been from the acid, whether it was coconut vinegar, sugarcane vinegar, or something akin.  The tuna was even visibly cured in a different way, creating a more milky but sharp liquor vs. the lighter leche de tigre.  Quite the eye-opening experience for me in terms of a what other delicious raw preparations are out there, and the perfect culmination to my Manhattan adventure.

I'm going to be spending more time in New York City for work, so I plan to continue this as a running series; hence the "- Part One."  Ceviche-style dishes were the perfect place to start, too.  American Chef Andrea Carbine said ceviche, with its cooked texture and common, approachable accompaniments like tortilla chips or corn nuts, is the perfect gateway food for those squeamish about raw seafood fare.  I couldn't agree more.  My only question is: what's next?  Anything is possible in NYC, and those possibilities are endless for Manhattan Raw.  Sushi & sashimi, oyster & clam bars, cured & cold-smoked fish, carpaccios & crudos, poke & lomi lomi.  I've definitely got to search out some Korean mulhoe and san-nakji.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

Cheers,
The SF Oyster Nerd