Seamus Mullen has several accolades behind his name. He raised the former Suba when it was failing, he gained attention and acclaim with Boqueria, he was on the Next Iron Chef and now he’s getting a TON of praise for his new venture, Tertulia. Sam Sifton of the New York Times awarded Tertulia 2 stars. Adam Platt of New York Magazine gave him three and said he was to Spanish cuisine as Batali is to Italian food and Bloomfield was to English gastropub. Big compliments indeed – HUGE. So….I HAD to see what the fuss was about.
Met Half Hopi at 6:45 pm on a Monday pretty confident we would be able to get a seat right away. (All editorials mention an impossibly packed restaurant every night with waits over an hour at times) So imagine my surprise when the hostess tells me that at that early hour, the wait was 90 minutes! Jeez. Thankfully we were able to nab two bar seats and were able to dine there.
Everything looked amazing. I loved that Iberico ham was scattered throughout the menu. We started with Iberico ham charcuterie – that wonderful meat of a pig that lives on a diet of acorns. Such a diet delivers a very fatty, delicious meat with a slight nuttiness that is out of this world good. Add the fact that it was illegal to import Iberico ham into the US until very recently and you got yourself something highly coveted. (sorry for the picture quality but I did not use flash – the ham is actually a beautiful deep ruby red and laced with glistening fat)
We gobbled that up with some pan con tomate. Salty, meaty goodness.
We also got the grilled clams with verdina beans and salsa verde:
Clams were sweet and briny and the salsa verde had a slight sour note that really woke up your salivary glands. Some crusty bread to sop it up and creamy beans to add substance. Delicious.
For main, we shared the arroz a la plancha with Calasparra rice, snails, wild mushrooms, celery, fennel and some of that wonderful Ibérico ham shaved on top. This version of paella has gotten alot of recognition by food critics and I knew I had to try it.
Half Hopi and I LOVED this. It’s like the crispy part of paella – the part that gets hard at the bottom of the pan – mixed with the more tender rice morsels. This dish was bursting of flavor. Mushrooms added an earthiness, the ham added a salty nuttiness and never would have thought celery would belong, but strangely the celery enhanced everything! Then every so often you got a bite of a tender snail. Not only were the flavors wonderful, it was a textural journey for our mouths. Cannot recommend this dish enough.
Finally we shared a special of the day – a meat stew which contained blood sausage, chorizo, large white beans and pork belly with the crispy skin still on it! It’s served with a side of pickled red cabbage to cut the richness:
Close up of the stew:
Meat heaven. The chorizo was spicy and garlicky as you know it should be. We were both hesitant to eat the blood sausage (I’ve had bad experience with blood sausages being too crumbly and pasty in texture which turns me off) but these were really good. The blood sausage was not pasty and held up pretty well in my mouth. They also didn’t taste too strongly of blood. There seemed to be some kind of cooked root radish in them, perhaps for texture? Now on to the best part – the pork belly. It was a brick of belly, but the most amazing part was the very crispy skin that was left on. It was so delicious. We crunched our way through that little piece of heaven.
We were full but made room for dessert: crepes filled with custard and served with cooked apples and cinnamon.
This is my kind of dessert: not too sweet, a little creaminess from the custard and the apples lent a slightly sour and sweet taste. I really liked this dessert alot.
All in all, this dinner exceeded our expectations. We both really enjoyed the food at Tertulia and agreed we had to come back to try the rest of the selections on the menu. The restaurant is rustic and cozy with alot of warm brick and dark woods – I could see it being a great place to have dinner in the oncoming cold winter nights.
Tertulia, 359 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY
