The best pastrami in NYC doesn’t come from a deli anymore
By
Steve Cuozzo
The short rib pastrami suya at David Geffen Hall's new Tatiana is the dish of the decade so far.
Move over, Katz’s! The
Big Apple’s best pastrami now comes from Tatiana, a stunning new restaurant at Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall that’s as thrilling to the taste buds as the music venue’s much-praised redesign is to the ears.
If Katz’s is
where Harry met Sally, Tatiana is where the Jewish-Romanian New York deli favorite met West Africa. Cured beef by way of Nigeria celebrates the cheerfully rules-breaking, culinary melting pot that an increasingly polyglot NYC has become.
Open only two weeks, Tatiana is already packed — and loud — every night. It isn’t too early to name
affable chef/partner Kwame Onwuachi’s short rib pastrami suya my favorite new dish of the decade. Sure, the decade’s still young — but it might be a long wait before anything better comes along.
Served foot-long and on the bone, it’s a thick layer of flesh that’s been braised, slow-cured and aggressively spice-dusted ($70 and enough for two).
The meat’s brined for three days in a spice mix that includes mustard seed, juniper, garlic and bay leaves. It’s next coated with a Nigerian-inspired suya blend, also known as yaji, lending notes of ginger, paprika and cayenne as it permeates the meat overnight. (Peanuts, a Nigerian staple, are not part of the dish, in order to protect those with allergies.) Three hours in the oven at 250 degrees allows the flavors to merge and deepen.
The result: beef that was supple enough on two different nights to nearly lick off the bone. The mingled flavors made a happy mosaic of pungent, nutty and peppery essences with not one of them dominating.
Although
Onwuachi grew up in The Bronx, the glittering room, behind floor-to-ceiling glass, is
his first New York restaurant. He previously launched popular eateries in Washington, DC, starred on “Top Chef,” wrote several books and earned
a James Beard Foundation award as “Rising Star Chef of the Year” in 2019.
Onwuachi also lived in Nigeria for two years, bringing his love for the country’s bounty home with him. The marriage sets off flavor fireworks that diners at Tatiana experience when ordering the short rib, as well as other dishes both fiery and mild, from crowd-pleasing, Creole-style head-on shrimp to near-drinkable curried goat patties.
But the pastrami short rib is the masterpiece. It’s an all-new animal that Onwuachi never served before. And it almost didn’t happen.
Just days before the opening, he decided, “I wanted to do a special beef dish. I was like, why don’t we do a play on pastrami as my ode to New York with an African twist?”
The collaborative crash project includes executive sous-chef Nicky Dembeck’s caraway cocoa bread, chef de cuisine Kamat Newman’s sweet mustard jus and restaurant partner David Paz-Grusin’s cabbage. The short rib is Wagyu beef from Washington state. Why not brisket, normally used to make pastrami?
“I wanted to do it somewhat different. I like serving things on the bone,” Onwuachi said.
He can serve it however he likes — the end result tasted more like the way I always wanted pastrami to taste
than it ever did at Katz’s, or anywhere else.
Still,
the iconic downtown eatery that gave birth to “I’ll have what she’s having” can hold its head high.
Move over, Katz’s!
nypost.com
