Why This Wagyu au Poivre Is So Different and Delicious!
But first: The amazing tacos at Carnitas Ramirez. Then: How to ace a meal at Brass, an awesome French splurge from Team Contra
Paid subscribers can scroll down for a steak-y writeup of Brass by the Contra folks!
It’s Saturday, 26 October, less than two weeks before the general election. I’ll be casting my ballot in New York today, the first day of early voting in our state, and the last day to register. Check your county board for polling places!
Alight. Let’s get to it. I have a rave for the steak au poivre at Brass — Team Contra’s splurge-y new French spot. The throwback room doubles as an Art Deco party, with Picasso-esque murals by Jessalyn Brooks and a piano piping out Jazz Age classics like “How Deep Is Your Love,” by The Bee Gees. If the chill space puts you in the mood for a cocktail, that’ll be $24, lol, because this is New York, and neither Kamala nor Trump will bail us out from rampant Martini Inflation. But lucky for us, Brass’s bartender serves smaller “two sipper” Manhattans and Sazeracs for $12 apiece. Good! We should all be drinking less anyway. At least after the election.
More on the steak in a bit, but first: Let’s talk tacos.
The luxury of carnitas
Pop quiz: If you want something super briny, easy, and elegant, what do you get? Answer: Caviar. But let’s be honest — salmon roe is a fine substitute for a few dollars less.
For the pure taste of beef, Miyazaki wagyu is hard to beat, right? Yeah, but if you don’t mind a little less marbling, good lengua conveys just as much meaty oomph. And for every pricey yakitori spot that I love, there’s a local rotisserie that serves supremely delicious chicken, even if doesn’t have those precise omakase nuances.
Here’s the thing, though: If you’re looking for the powerful taste of pork, distilled into a few single bites, I have just a single recommendation: Cuero and trompa tacos.
Maybe orejas too.
My favorite place for these tacos is Carnitas Ramirez in the East Village.
I know what you’re thinking. These aren’t fancy things. Cuero and trompa don’t have the pretty handbag swagger of pate en croute. They lack the jet-set reputation of Iberico or Prosciutto, which are more nutty than porky anyway.
These tacos are just piles of floppy skin and bronzed snout on warm tortillas. And that’s okay. They emit a sweet, musky perfume. They glisten underneath the lights. They wobble like flan. And they taste more intensely of roast pork than anything else I’ve tried. These tacos nourish in ways that classic, tired notions of luxury don’t have elevated answers for — at least not with this much flavor.
These tacos cost just $5 each.
Carnitas Ramirez is simple. It serves carnitas. Shoulder. Ribs. Ears. Tongue. Tail. Stomach. Jowl. Nose. Brains. Belly.
All destined for tacos.
Tania Apolinar and chef Giovanni Cervantes, the duo behind Taqueria Ramirez in Greenpoint, opened Carnitas this summer. And it instantly ranked as one of the city’s finest new restaurants. There is no wait staff, no tables — just pork, Pacifico, and Topo Chico. You wash your hands with bright pink soap in a communal sink. You sit on industrial plastic containers, repurposed as makeshift stools. And you eat.
And what you’re eating, without fail, is pork, in the style of Michoacán.
The kitchen, overseen by Cervantes and chef Yvon de Tassigny, sears ribs, butt, shank, and other meaty cuts for a little bit of color, but that’s just a pit stop, the owners tell me. Where everything — including all the organs — gets super tender is in the manteca madre, the prized lard that bubbles in giant vats. A nice little jacuzzi with garlic and salts! Eventually, a chef fishes out the meats, and plops them into metal holding pens filled with fat and jus. Soon after, the cleaver does its work, and presto, onto a tortilla this all goes.
The tacos arrive on naked on red, yellow, and orange plates. Porcine flesh on nixtamalized corn. It’s a pure product play with no sauces, herbs, onions or condiments. How austere.
Then you pick up the taco. The meat is so tender — so dripping with fat — that simply folding the tortilla transforms the pig into pâté. How indulgent. This is lush food. Precise food. A snack that makes me smile uncontrollably.
You’ve heard me gripe about this before: Too many restaurant websites are terrible. They’re too parsimonious with useful information. If you can actually find an online menu without scanning Yelp, consider yourself lucky.
But the Carnitas Ramirez site is a little different. It publishes a helpful little guide.
The restaurant — taking a page from L.A. Taco — posts a glossary alongside its menu, offering commentary on all the textures and tastes. Ramirez describes rabo, or tail, like this: “meaty and full of fat, these eat like oxtail.”
And orejas, or ears, are tender on the outside, but they contain cartilage that doesn’t soften, “so it has a crunch.”
I like writing these types of guides. Once upon a time, I even compared the firm bounciness of raw beef liver to pate de fruits.
Though I try to be careful. I remind myself that over-explanation can beget other-ization. To wit: Stateside food writers don’t tend to follow phrases like “pepperoni pizza” or “carne asada tacos” with short definitions crammed into parentheticals. What we choose to explain — and what we state plainly — says a lot about us.
“The rotisserie chicken tasted like rotisserie chicken.” — Pete Wells, 2016 (Still a brilliant line)
That all said, there’s a reason we deploy comparisons and euphemisms when chatting about offal. If you know what a kidney does, you’ll want a non-renal word to describe its taste. And quite frankly not a lot of brick and mortar taquerias in Manhattan regularly offer variety meats like rabo and buche — though quite a few Latin, Korean, and Sichuan restaurants have long served off cuts with little fanfare.
So! Folks who are a little timid about offal will appreciate the glossary. I like how the team here helps patrons build a new taste vocabulary — while getting them excited about trying something unfamiliar. Really, it’s similar to reading a Playbill before your show.
The glossary even reminds me of how critics once used a mini yakitori boom to ensure we could all see delicacies like chicken artery and knee-gristle in a positive light. Indeed, that’s what’s happening here at Ramirez. The restaurant is helping us recenter the language of deliciousness.
Let’s get back to the tacos.
The cooks pull long, silken sheets of cuero from warm vats of jus. It’s as if they’re about to cut fabric for a good suit. Then, they cleave the skin with a series of efficient hand motions. Thump. Thump. Thump. What results looks like fat udon.
At this point, you might be tempted to raid the condiment bar and add salsa or pickled carrots. But do me a favor. Try the taco by itself. Notice how the skin bounces and chews like soft boba; the texture that some call Q comes to mind. Appreciate how the gelatins make your lips stick.
Enjoy the clean, porky aroma.
Next, try the trompa. The chopped nose sports a handsome brown hue, as if marinated in soy. The texture is softer than the cuero, akin to a raw scallop. You don’t chew it as much as you let it slip around in your mouth. It emits a deep, dark, rich punch of swine. It’s intense. But the tortilla, made with Nixtamal masa and packed with the essence of sunbaked corn, cleanses the palate.
Move onto the orejas. The sliced ears are jiggly and bronzed, like jellied stock. But a white strip of cartilage runs through each one. Yes, it packs a crunch, but it’s a subtle one, sort of like potato chips on a tuna salad sandwich. It’s perfect. And the flavor is just as rich as with the trompo, but with less stickiness.
For a final taco, try the lengua, for a wallop of tender meatiness. And just as tasty are the ribs. They’re soft and meaty — until you encounter a satisfying crunch of cartilage. Wicked.
One last thing.
Tacos are a staple of everyday eating across the country. And indeed, the ones at Ramirez are far more affordable than, say, the lobster flautas or Dover Sole with tortillas you’ll encounter elsewhere.
But when I think about the cuero, the word my subconscious screams is “luxury.” That’s what I hear when I taste this pure expression of pork. That’s what I feel while eating snout so rich that I only eat one of these tacos — just as you only need a few spoonfuls of a fancy (or rustic) mole negro.
Luxury is watching cleaver work that ranges from precise to gorgeously haphazard.
None of this means we need to see cuero and trompo at chef’s counter spots; I’m as worried as anyone about the gentrification of everyday ingredients. Luxury doesn’t have to be about limited quantities and high prices.
If anything, the traditionally-minded staples at Carnitas Ramirez recall the creative focaccia at Superiority Burger. That is to say: In our world divided by class, it’s nice to know there’s not always a ubiquitous fancy analogue for everything. Sometimes, sustenance and luxury seem to merge, like they do here — and at other fine purveyors of carnitas.
Sometimes, a lot more money can’t buy you better food. 210 East Third Street, East Village
Five Steps for Acing a Meal at Brass, our Next French Splurge
Step One: Get the steak au poivre
I know what you’re thinking.
Brass is a hotel restaurant — in Midtown! And hotel restaurants need safe hotel dishes. They are required to accommodate corporate diners who just want a steak after a brutal day of booking travel and firing their subordinates.
But Brass is different. It’s a fine-dining riff on a brasserie. Chefs Fabián von Hauske Valtierra and Jeremiah Stone aren’t engaging in algorithmic trend chasing in an era of au poivre everything. They’re giving us steak as an intentional act of creative gastronomy. And it’s really, really delicious.