The guacamole at Corima, a Mexican restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is made without any avocados—just edamame and pistachios. A seaweed tuile tops Corima’s chocoflan dessert. And then there’s the house-made flour tortilla with recado negro butter, which is served as part of a $110 seven-course tasting menu, though you can also get it for $9 à la carte.
What sounds like the stuff of viral New York Times stories is entirely a product of Mexico and Texas. Corima chef and co-owner Fidel Caballero grew up on both sides of the border, first in Chihuahua City, Mexico, and then around Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. “As they like to say, neither aquí nor allí,” says Caballero. “I’m a little too Mexican to be American, and too American to be Mexican.”
Corima is Caballero’s love letter to northern Mexico’s ingredients, traditions, and terroir, with additional inspiration from the chef’s time in other countries. That means such dishes as duck-heart tacos, quesadillas with asadero and huitlacoche, and kampachi crudo with fermented husk-cherry salsa and chicharrón furikake (a version of the seaweed-based Japanese seasoning that incorporates pork). Diners who come expecting familiar Tex-Mex, Oaxacan, or Mexico City staples instead discover what Caballero calls “progressive Mexican.”
The tortilla—a billowy and tender delight made with sourdough starter and Sonoran wheat flour—helped Corima win the internet early on, both for the unique way it is made (with a blowtorch on an overturned wok, instead of a comal) and for being tasty. But it’s the whole package that has made Corima, which opened in January, one of Bon Appétit’s best new restaurants and also has it up for Michelin consideration.
Those accolades mean something to Caballero, as he originally left El Paso to pursue high-caliber cooking. The now-35-year-old played in various local punk bands as a teenager at Franklin High School, coming up at the tail end of the same music scene that produced the Mars Volta and Zechs Marquise. He went to the local community college with aspirations of getting into furniture design, but soon after enrolling, he decided it would be much more fun to wield a chef’s knife than an angle ruler. Eventually culinary school was superseded by hands-on experience at various El Paso–area restaurants, including Ardovino’s Desert Crossing. Then Caballero and his friend Alfredo “Fredy” Rodarte started their own food truck, selling tacos at punk and metal gigs.
“We felt like pirates on a ship,” Caballero says. “We were like, ‘Man, I’m tired of listening to these chefs. Let’s just get a food truck.’ It was called Spork, and we just started cooking the stuff that we wanted to eat.”
But they dreamed of doing more. Rodarte headed for L.A. (he’s now the chef at Brooklyn’s Runner Up), while Caballero’s ambitions brought him first to Shanghai, China, and then to Martín Berasategui’s eponymous three-Michelin-starred restaurant, near San Sebastián, Spain. He eventually landed in New York and worked as sous chef at Contra, one of the city’s most acclaimed restaurants, for ten years. That meant he had a lot of fans when he finally struck out on his own.
Corima, which Caballero co-owns with his wife, Sofia Ostos (who is also from Ciudad Juárez and El Paso), began life as—what else?—a pandemic-era pop-up moving around the city but also finding its way to Paris, Mexico City, and, yes, El Paso. Every brick-and-mortar-restaurant opening is plagued with unexpected issues; at Corima, that included not having gas. Fortunately, Caballero and his crew already knew how to “MacGyver [their] way to success,” he says. Hence the nontraditional tortilla-cooking method. “ ‘Oh, my God, they’re so innovative,’ ” Caballero says with a smile, remembering the restaurant’s initial wave of critical acclaim. “No, we’re just in the weeds, man! Like, we didn’t know what to do.”
These days the tortillas are rolled out and griddled on a big, flat plancha, though the kitchen is still quite compact, with just two ovens, two electric burners, and a grill fired by both mesquite and Japanese binchō-tan charcoal. The week Caballero talked to Texas Monthly, he had just led a “tortilla meeting” with his five-person kitchen staff because those precious discs are always being adjusted and perfected. As with any bread that uses both sourdough starter and freshly milled wheat flour, there are always issues of hydration, humidity, and general consistency. But the first and biggest issue was fat: During development, the team attempted the tortilla with tallow, duck fat, lard, and chicken fat, with the last being the initial favorite, when frozen (much like butter for a biscuit). But Caballero didn’t want the tortilla to be off-limits to vegetarians, so it’s now made with cultured butter sourced from dairies in Hokkaido, Japan; Chihuahua; and New York state.
The tortilla was conceived in Caballero’s mind as a cross between a scallion pancake (something he enjoyed in Shanghai) and an oversized Sonoran sobaquera. “The flexibility and chew of a scallion pancake and the sponginess and chew of a tortilla—that’s what we wanted,” he says. And yes, the tortilla is excellent—in addition to enjoying it with the smoky-sweet recado negro butter, I saved a few hunks to sop up the Berkshire pork with pipián verde.
The drinks served at the bar are equally devoted to northern Mexico, with an emphasis on sotol, the Chihuahan spirit that for Caballero is most evocative of home, with its scent of creosote, wet sand, and desert rain. Desert Rain is actually the name of Corima’s signature cocktail, a Negroni riff made with sotol, Cocchi Americano, and dry vermouth.
As for the inspiration for the edamame guac, Ostos is allergic to avocados, and her husband’s just a hater. “I’m that Mexican,” he says. “Not a big fan of avocado. I think it’s overhyped.” And, of course, it’s also quite expensive. So when his Paris pop-up requested guacamole, Caballero pureed edamame with onions cured with lime juice and added pistachios for more color and healthy fat, as well as a pico de gallo made with cilantro stems, which are even stronger in flavor than the leaves. At Corima, it’s been served with both cecina (dried beef) and tartare on a tlayuda, with salsa veracruzana and chicatana ants, and it’s one of the most popular items. “Never say never, but it’s going to stay on the menu for a while,” Caballero says.
Not everybody gets Corima, and not everybody has to. Corima’s diners include people from Mexico, and Caballero has noticed a lot of them experience the restaurant in stages. “I feel like they get in here very excited, and then they get weirded out in the middle of it,” he says. “And then they leave very proud of what we’re doing and how we’re representing that side of the world.”
Caballero’s own grandmother might blanch at the notion of him putting black garlic in mole or squid-ink tonnato on a tamal, “but it just tastes good,” he says. “And I never said we were going to be an authentic restaurant. I said we were going to do progressive Mexican cuisine, and we were going to bring stuff from the north. Including myself. Because of this cooking and this way of thinking, now it’s much easier to explain where I’m from.”
