Mexican-ish Fine Dining, with Detours

This attention-grabbing tortilla has already received feature treatment in Eater (“unlike any tortilla in New York”). Grub Street has called it one of the best in the city. Verily, it’s a great tortilla, chewy and dimensional. But it was Caballero’s enormous, jewel-like seasonal sashimi platter that really brought me in the door. It kept turning up in my social-media feeds, a gleaming array of slabs of assorted fish in shades of pink and white. The dish looked like a persuasive distillation of Caballero’s sensibility: a precise, luxurious Japanese framework filled out with Mexican flavors, including a bowl of chiles toreados (blistered over an open flame) and a sunrise-yellow aioli made with charred onions and smoked wheat. During a recent meal at the bar, though, I was confused not to see the platter on the menu; the bartender said that it had just recently been eighty-sixed, and hinted that I wasn’t the first to ask after it. (The dish’s runaway popularity might be why I overheard one customer refer to Corima as a “sushi fusion” restaurant.) The bartender recommended that I instead try the hiramasa crudo: thick, firm-fleshed slices of yellow jack layered with crunchy rectangles of celtuce (a.k.a. stem lettuce), dressed in about a zillion things, including olive oil, soy sauce, a husk-cherry salsa, and a fragrant herb, sesame, and chicharrón dust that was something like a Mexican furikake. Despite the lightness of the raw fish, the flavors were deep and round; if you’re looking for the aesthetic austerity of Caballero’s sashimi platter, you won’t find it here, but the dish is marvellous on its own considerably more maximalist terms.