The Unassuming, Exceptional Food of Mitica - The New Yorker

Tables for Two

The Unassuming, Exceptional Food of Mitica

Mitica's menu is small enough that I ate through it in just two visits, and found nary a misstep.Photographs by Jeremy Liebman for The New Yorker

Published in the July 3, 2023 Issue

At Mariscos El Submarino, which opened in 2020, on the border of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, in Queens, there's no ambiguity about what you're in for. On a chaotic block of Roosevelt Avenue, the restaurant is beachy and brightly lit, mariachi blaring, plastic cutlery and several hot-sauce bottles on every table. The menu is dense with affordably priced seafood dishes from the northwest coast of Mexico, including multiple varieties of aguachile, for which raw shrimp (or an assortment of shrimp, fish, and octopus) is quick-cured in a brothy mix of lime juice, salt, and chili.

Mitica—the second restaurant from El Submarino's owners, Alonso Guzman and Amy Hernandez—which opened in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in May, is altogether more mysterious. "You've heard a lot of stories but never anything like this," Mitica's Instagram bio reads. "Walk in as a person and leave like a legend." (The name comes from the Spanish word for "mythical.") I'm still puzzling over what that means, but my bigger question is: How can such an unassuming restaurant be this exceptional?

Cocktails include the Red Sunset, made with mezcal, ancho-chili-infused Campari, watermelon juice, and lime.

Mitica's dimly lit, generically decorated dining room is less than inviting, divided awkwardly by a staircase into two narrow corridors. (The back patio has the best seats in the house.) But a lack of high-design aesthetics belies a menu that is expertly refined, and truly exciting. There is just one aguachile here, the most potent variety from El Submarino: the Negro, made with soy sauce, which turns the cold broth an appealingly gothic shade, and chiltepín peppers imported from Sinaloa, which give it a powerful kick, not for the faint of heart or palate. At El Submarino, the bluish raw shrimp are flayed down the middle and fanned out in a molcajete, over cucumber and beneath red onion and avocado. At Mitica, the shrimp are lightly simmered—which adds a lovely pop of coral—then pressed neatly into an elegant arch with alternating slices of cucumber, charred avocado, and red onion, and garnished with flowering Delfino cilantro, a subtle, frilly variety.

In competition with the aguachile for my favorite Mitica dish is the Taco Gobernador, another upgrade of an offering at El Submarino, where a corn tortilla, with a little carrot added to the masa, for extra earthy sweetness, is folded around chopped shrimp and queso Chihuahua and then griddled in shrimp butter. At Mitica, the tortilla is filled only with cheese, griddled in lobster butter, and topped with plump shreds of lobster meat, coins of serrano chili and pearl onion, Delfino cilantro, and a velvety, gently spicy salsa de árbol.

An enormous pork shank adobada served with mashed potato and tortillas.

Mitica's menu is small enough that I ate through it in just two visits, and found nary a misstep. The sixteen-dollar price tag on the guacamole might raise eyebrows, especially given that it's served with just four large chips (additional will cost you), but it's as unexpectedly, beguilingly luscious as the version at Atla, Enrique Olvera's upscale NoHo cantina, where one of Mitica's chefs, Edgar Gonzalez, once worked. Meanwhile, fresh tortillas, still steaming, make for an embarrassment of riches when served with a perfectly cooked fillet of steelhead trout (topped with aioli, smoked and fresh fennel, crispy potatoes, and serrano chili) and with a beautiful rib eye, charred, carved into rosy slices, and finished with a sweet-and-sour pasilla-chili demi-glace, melty whole spring onions, and greens that have wilted in the heat of the meat. Pipian verde, a classic Mexican sauce made with pumpkin seeds, tomatillos, and green chilies, is stirred into risotto, which is topped with a crackly sliced duck breast that imparts a richness akin to foie gras.

From a kitchen full of surprises, dessert is no exception, all deception. "Strawberries and cream" turns out to be a heavenly pouf of whipped sour cream, topped with strawberry granita and flaky salt and hiding slivers of macerated strawberries. An ordinary-looking chocolate mousse has the delightful texture of melting ice cream and blooms on the tongue in bursts of cinnamon and salt—sweet, bitter, and deep. (Dishes $15-$75.) ♦

Desserts, from left: chocolate mousse; macerated strawberries topped with whipped sour cream and strawberry granita.