The food is—and looks—radical; some Spanish critics, who’ve been following the exploits of Ferran Adria and his disciples for years, say Romera’s food is the most high-concept cuisine in the world. It’s even got its own language: the chef, a doctor by training who maintained a neurology practice while running his Michelin-starred Barcelona restaurant L’Esguard, describes what he does as “neurogastronomy.” Which means that his precision with such banal details like temperature and color of the food is on another level that that of most other chefs; it is, appropriately, a scientist’s precision.
The dining room at Romera New YorkA lot of the hype might just be marketing, but it’s obvious this isn’t everyday dining. “It’s the same as an art show,” Romera told me via a translator when I went to visit him at the restaurant prior to its opening last week. “You go three, four times a year.” We were standing in the basement-level dining room. The $245 tasting menu (it’s your only option) is served on a dramatic stage: the room slightly raised on a platform, everything pristine and white, a bit like a canvas for his colorful dishes.
As a youth growing up in Argentina, Romera had studied to be a painter, and it’s clear that he’s built these artistic aspirations into the foundations of his persona as a chef. On at least three occasions the chef, who has a professorial demeanor—earnest, excitable, playful, endlessly tangential—referenced Picasso or Van Gogh to make a point about his cooking. What the food more closely resembles, however, are the geometric abstractions of Donald Judd. (At least the dish that I tasted, a sort of idealized veggie soup Romera calls “Isis,” did.) If Judd’s boxes were more about what was excluded than included, then their minimalist purity have found a new incarnation in the plates of Chef Romera.
Romera's "Isis"I asked the chef to break down the process of how “Isis” is made. Here are his notes: like Judd’s sculptures, what looks simple on the surface is deceptively complex.
“In the traditional vegetable soup, you peel the vegetables, add them to the water, turn on the burner, add salt, and cover it. When it’s done, each one of the elements are still there, but it doesn’t exists in its purity. You’re not eating a piece of potato or a piece of celery; you’re eating something that tastes and smells like vegetables, but they’re not the individual vegetables themselves. The temperature of the water has created a fusion. To make the flavor of each vegetable independent, you cannot use a pot. Which is why I divide the plate into three parts: The dried mini-vegetables; the steamed vegetables; and the consommé.”
“The vegetable squares are dried at 90 degrees Celsius in the oven. There are 15 different vegetables at the bottom of the plate in a mosaic of 48 little squares: including spinach, tomato, daikon radish, carrot, tomato, red pepper, artichoke, broccoli, beet, and green onion.”
“In the second phase, I make individual vegetables one by one. In Barcelona, I grew my own miniature vegetables; here, we have collaborated with the Chef’s Garden farm in Ohio. They are exceptional. I steam them in bamboo steamers, and then we warm them up in butter.”
“Then a consommé made up of the same vegetables is poured over the plate, dissolving the mosaic into broth.”
Photos: courtesy of Romera New York



Hugue Dufour
From left: posters for Le Fooding's "Campire Session" and "Exquisite Corpse."
David Waddington, owner of Bistrotheque
The dining scene
Princess Julia
The central bar area
Comfortable lounging options
Christina Aguilera is on set for our
Ruthy’s Bakery
A room in Mr. C.
Drinks at Apl.
The interior of Apl.
Joey Verdone on the DJ decks.
The hottest French gastronomic import is a platter piled with steak,
fish, chicken, or eggs and a sprinkling of oat bran—the menu for
the “Attack” phase of the Dukan Diet. Created by French nutritionist
Pierre Dukan, the diet is quickly gaining converts (who call themselves Dukanians) for its rapid pound-shedding results. Despite its Atkinsean undertones, Dukan is different. No bacon here; all protein must be lean, and after the aforementioned “Attack,” the “Cruise” phase allows veggies into the mix. “Consolidation”
preps for the resumption of a balanced diet, and the final leg, “Stabilization,”
is the return to menu normalcy—or as normal as life can be with every Thursday
being “Attack” day for the rest of your life.
They called it fig-gate. A year ago, when Momofuku chef David Chang publicly proclaimed that "every restaurant in San Francisco is just serving figs on a plate with nothing on it," he set off an East Coast-West Coast war of the words to rival Biggie vs. Tupac. (One headline from that time: SAN FRANCISCO TO DAVID CHANG: GO MOMOFUKU YOURSELF.) Now, the food fight has given way to an old-fashioned cook-off. This weekend at New York's P.S. 1, the second annual Le Grand Fooding festival pits Chang and six other Big Apple chefs against six major San Francisco toques. Nate Appleman, now the chef at Pulino's, is in a unique position, having arrived in Manhattan just last year after a very successful nine-year-stint in San Francisco. Appleman chatted with W about where his loyalty truly lies.
Of course, this is New York, where any eating establishment that has the word "best" in its name invariably invites suspicion. We recently had one of the cakes sent to the W offices for a taste test.













