La Vara and Cobble Hill Get Two More Stars from Wells

Cobble Hill and Pete Wells are becoming great friends. Andy Ricker opened Pok Pok NY on Columbia Street in the western reaches of the neighborhood earlier this year and Wells gave it two stars in June.  This week, Wells goes back to Cobble Hill, to La Vara, and gives it the same two-star treatment.

La Vara opened on Clinton Street back in May.  It's the newest project from Alex Raij and her husband/co-chef Eder Montero.  Here, the married couple are bringing a unique twist to the Spanish cuisine that can be found at their other restaurants in Chelsea: Txikito and El Quinto Pino.  At La Vara, there's a focus on "the vast legacy of the Jews and Muslims who shared the Iberian Peninsula with Christians for centuries.  This three-way marriage, known as la convivencia, did wonderful things for the country’s kitchens."

"La Vara serves most things as small tapas-size dishes.  Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t."  In a Diner's Journal article published today, Wells asks the reader, "Do you like small plates restaurants? Do you like lots of little tastes, or do you want more?"  The result is an ongoing dialogue on Twitter (read the highlights here) that includes the likes of Bloomberg restaurant critic Ryan Sutton and David Chang.

Wells clearly enjoyed a few dishes at La Vara, namely the griddled red shrimp and a pasta called gurullos, which he found to be "as fluffy as an Italian grandmother’s prizewinning gnocchi."  The review is as much a dissecction of La Vara's efforts as it is a thorough lesson on the history of religion in Spain.  "La Vara, by the way, was the name of a Jewish newspaper published in New York until it ceased in 1948."