Subcommandante Marcos, go straight to the ghetto.

The RG goes ape over a spot* that sounds as if it was conceived with 11th graders from Choate in the city for the day as its core constituency:

There's no kitchen at Desnuda, a new cevicheria on Seventh St. in the East Village. There's a popcorn popper, a microwave, a dinky sushi fridge, and a toaster oven. So how does Christian Zammas, the chef, manages to smoke raw oysters every night? In a gravity bong, of course. Zammas made his bong from scratch, using a Sprite bottle and a glass bowl he bought on St. Marks Place.He packs the glass bowl with Lapsang souchong tea leaves and Sichuan peppercorns, lights it on fire, then catches the smoke in a shot glass and places it over a raw oyster.

Cooking with a bong? Radical! It's like Poochie opened a cooking school.

He does it right on the bar. Now for the audience participation part. You lift the shot glass, inhale the intoxicating, pine-like perfume, then raise the oyster to your mouth and let it slip down your throat.

Call me a fussbudget, but I can imagine subtracting the sichuan peppercorns, the lapsan souchong tea leaves, the empty bottle of Sprite, and the gravity bong from St. Mark's place, and just, you know, eat the oyster. But:

Dinner at Desnuda isn't just dinner.

It's edible, interactive performance art. It's just a sliver of a space, but it's completely stylish, far more stylish than its chef. Zammas' thick, black-rimmed glasses are held together by Scotch tape. So is the rest of his appearance. But you won't mind.He's a student of guerrilla molecular gastronomy, or as he puts it, ghetto molecular gastronomy. In other words, he's a low-budget, culinary mad scientist.

It had not occured to me that there could be a pair of terms that could make molecular gastronomy more irritating. But these are the two. For "Guerilla molecular gastronomy," see illustration at right "Ghetto," as a term of disapprobation/faux valorization, I hear more than I would like, by virtue of being around the utes a good deal. "Dude, my phone is so ghetto, it does not even have a QUERTY keyoard..." etc. By and large, it refers to items beyond the scope of inhabitants of either the Warsaw or New York kind of ghetto. Like, for instance, ceviche is a food they don't eat much of in the ghetto:

For a dish called ceviche mixto, he mixes salmon, scallops and tuna with cinnamon, lemon, lime, shallots, Sprite, and rocoto paste, made from a South American pepper.

Sprite? "I was drinking a Sprite when I came up with the dish," he says. Think of it as East Village Champagne. It tastes far more sophisticated than it sounds. All of this is happening on the fly. After all, letting fish oversit in ceviche is the equivalent of overcooking. This is cooking one customer at a time, one dish at a time.

East Village Champagne? Does the RG have an editor? A clue? Guess not. The dish itself sounds like something your stoner cousin might whip up after a semester in Argentina. You have to wonder if Zammas has ever had what he considered a bad idea.

Zammas is not alone behind the bar. It's a two-man show. In some sense, Zammas came out of nowhere, from restaurants you've never heard of. Co-owner Peter Gevrekis comes from Wall Street, where he used to be a broker.

Gee, RG, try us, considering that this place was sort of off the radar before you dropped three stars on it.

Now, he shucks oysters and tends bar at Desnuda. Here's how it works. You walk in, take one of the 18 seats in this restaurant; there isn't a menu. The two men behind the bar explain their offerings for the night.There's two kinds of oysters with four different sauces, nine kinds of ceviche, free truffle popcorn, and a few other things. Then they go to work right in front of you.I ordered the apple and fig mixto. It requires pomegranate molasses, which they're out of. So Zammas darts across the street to the Bourgeois Pig to get some. A few minutes pass. And he sets in front of me a ceviche with salmon, scallops, cilantro chiffonade, green apple, green pepper, brown turkey figs, cherry tomatoes, and a hit of mustard oil. It's an amazing riot of textures and flavors, and yet perfectly balanced. This is how food should be, prepared right in front of you with fresh ingredients and tons of imagination.

Sounds terrific, if you happen to have the foresight to take some pharmaceutical grade Ecstasy before you go out. Otherwise, it sounds like trying to eat the set of Laugh-in.

Dinner at Desnuda is completely unpredictable, in the best way. Oh, I left something out of the kitchen inventory, a blowtorch. Order the tuna dessert — yes, tuna — and Zammas will whip out his blowtorch. He brulees ruby red slabs of tuna sashimi, then dusts them with salt and a sour orange zest. The finishing touch is a soy mirin glaze. If there's mackerel in the house, order it.

Unpredictable, yes, what with the running out of pomegranate molasses and all, but also, evidently unpredictable in in the sense of an incoherent review of an entirely unappetizing restaurant appearing with 3/5 stars in a major metropolitan daily.

*Thx to Kludt for keeping an eye on RG.

Comments

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