Ever since David Chang made the momentous decision, nearly a decade ago, to abandon the kitchen at Café Boulud and open a small noodle shop downtown, ambitious young cooks have been leaving gourmet kitchens in droves. They’ve opened Italian delicatessens (Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone at Torrisi Italian Specialties), neighborly southern-cooking joints (Robert Newton’s Seersucker in Brooklyn), and countless burger bars. But even by today’s standards, Alex Stupak’s decision came as a shock. Over the years, he’s won many accolades and awards for his avant-garde dessert creations, first in Chicago, with the molecular gastronomist Grant Achatz, and then here in New York, with Wylie Dufresne, at wd~50. But late last year, Stupak announced that he would be laying down his syringes and immersion blenders to pursue what, presumably, was a lifetime dream. The most creative dessert chef of his generation had decided to open what one of my scandalized gourmet colleagues described as “a high-end taco shop.”
Empellón is the name of Stupak’s new project, and in fairness, it’s not really a high-end taco shop at all, although there are plenty of high-end tacos on the menu. It’s a casually elegant Mexican restaurant that has been designed (like Torrisi and the Momofukus before it) to appeal to the new breed of scruffy, tattoo-bearing, avowedly non-gourmet culinary sophisticates who have radically reshaped the city’s dining scene over the past decade. This means the brick walls of the old space on West 4th Street are painted in a clean, no-nonsense shade of white. There is a bronzed Virgin Mary from Mexico by the restrooms and a Frida Kahlo–like portrait on one of the walls, but otherwise the main dining room is mostly devoid of frippery. The wooden tables are linen-free, and the long bar is designed as much for eating as it is for tippling the restaurant’s exhaustive, impressively esoteric selection of artisanal tequilas and mezcals.
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