Aldea

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George Mendes is one of the New York restaurant world’s more storied ghosts. The Portuguese-American chef (Aldea is a riff on “village” in Portuguese) has worked with an impressive array of divas around the globe (Alain Ducasse, Kurt Gutenbrunner, and David Bouley, to name a few). His own restaurant, however, is small, stylishly modest, and characteristically muted. The double-height, blond-wood-paneled space is set with chairs covered in plush white and blue leather, and the view of the outside world is filtered by a façade of white-striped glass. The room is luminously lit and partitioned with sheets of more glass, which make it feel intimate and also worldly, like a boutique tapas bar in some hidden modish section of Barcelona. Mendes is steeped in all the fashionable, highbrow cooking techniques of our day, and his Mediterranean-accented menu is a distillation of disparate influences rendered in the chef’s spare, deceptively simple style. It begins with a limited though decorous selection of small-plate petiscos, like layers of fresh sea urchin laid over thin sticks of toast spread with cauliflower cream. There are only five appetizers, and if you’re wise, you’ll order a creation called “shrimp Alhinho” (made with seared shrimp, flecks of fresh cilantro, and a delicious shrimp reduction finished with smoked paprika). The open kitchen allows you to observe Mendes and his acolytes slaving earnestly in their spotless whites and caps. The entrées they produce rotate, but have been everything from chicken stuffed with foie gras to house salt cod with chouriço and smoked mussels. The dish everyone at my table went slightly nuts over was the arroz de pato, a kind of newfangled trencherman’s paella made with nickels of chorizo and olives mingled with salty wafers of duck crackling and pieces of soft pulled-duck confit. With its pocket-size kitchen, its small but sophisticated menu, and its technically accomplished, low-profile chef, Aldea looked like a prototype of the gourmet restaurant of tomorrow when it opened in 2009. The compact, two-page wine list features an eclectic selection of bottles from eight countries, many of which are under $50. The desserts (plus sorbets and cheeses) are adept little riffs on simplicity itself: feathery light, doughnut-hole-like “sonyos,” and the best, the rice-pudding tarte. The pudding is smooth instead of sticky, and it’s garnished in an unexpected way, with diaphanous, slightly salty ribbons of rice crackling. — Adam Platt

Sea-urchin toast, shrimp Alhinho, escolar or arroz de pato, rice-pudding tarte.

Related Stories

New York Magazine Reviews

• Adam Platt's Full Review (6/8/09)

Best of New York Awards

• Best Paella (2010)

Featured In

• Adam Platt's Where to Eat 2011 (1/3/11)
• Adam Platt's Where to Eat 2010 (1/4/10)
• Where to Eat 2010: Best New Restaurants (1/4/10)
• Where to Eat 2010: Best New Chefs (1/4/10)
• Restaurant Openings: Aldea, Bánh Mì 172, Chabela’s, and Studio Square (5/18/09)
• Fall Preview 2008: The Best of the Season's New Restaurants (9/1/08)

Recipes at Aldea

• Hemingway Heat (2011)