In the first installment of our new newsletter, The Food Scene, hels tries nearly every dish at Café Mars, in Gowanus. Read her full review—and sign up to receive new editions in your in-box—right here:
Debbie Harry rocks the dining room, while the bathroom soundtrack is an endless playlist of the late comedian Mitch Hedberg, deadpan and absurd: “I had a piece of Carefree sugarless gum, and I was still worried. It never kicked in.
A meal at Café Mars begins with a splash of ceremony: a server shimmers to the table bearing a woven basket full of mismatched stemware, and two bottles from which to pour a preprandial sip. From there, it seems, almost every table orders a plate of quivering dark-orange gelatin cubes. These are “jell-olives”: gently saline Castelvetrano olives suspended in cubes of Negroni jello, like specimens in a murky jar.
The handle on the door to Café Mars is a fettuccine-extrusion die; D’Avino and Olarte clearly take the matter of pasta very seriously. They make their own, and seem to relish reviving obscure or underappreciated forms.—a sort of fat, curly-edged double helix—are served with “lemon, lemon, lemon” and capers and basil in a meatless evocation of piccata. The shape that the menu simply calls “waves”—scalloped curls that crest like Kanagawa’s great billow—is the best thing on the entire menu.
The menu, which D’Avino and Olarte plan to change with the seasons, is for now overwhelmingly light: dishes are bright, produce-forward, and mostly sized for grazing rather than for gut-busting. My favorite of the larger plates was the “pancake primavera,” a big, tremblingof Italian greens and pickled root vegetables. Held together with just a whisper of binder, it was as weightless as the bonito flakes that danced atop it.
The menu does hold hints of heartier things to come: a note-perfect braised-beef-and-onion ragù dresses a cord of rigidly geometric—triangular penne, a jolting departure from the tubular pasta’s expected sensuous roundness. Parmigiana, that old red-sauce standby, gets a Flintstonian makeover with the use of rich, smoke-kissed pork ribs—a slab of four, on the bone, breaded and fried and smothered in the requisite marinara and cheese, and presented with a knife stuck in its middle.
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