By Hannah Selinger - June 19, 2019
“The concept was in place, and we knew what we wanted to do,” Christy Cober, Honest Man Restaurant Group partner said of the group’s newest project, Amagansett’s Coche Comedor. That elusive “what” was Mexican food, in the form of a high-concept restaurant that would also provide the opportunity for a more authentic style of dining. “We always try to dig into the roots of the concept. We try to figure out: What really is Mexican food? What really is barbecue?” In the case of Coche Comedor, Mexican food is not easily defined by a reigning ingredient or dish. It’s a style — a style brought back to the United States in earnest.
In January, Cober, Mark Smith, Toni Ross, and Joe Realmuto — the restaurant group’s four partners — took a five-day trip to Mexico, in which they ate, considered, and ate some more. They ate elevated cuisine — including a meal in Mexico City, at chef Enrique Olvera’s famed Pujol — as well as street food.
“We threw a wide net out there, and asked everyone where we should go. People that travel there. Artists that travel there. We asked food people. We asked chefs. It was interesting that, all the different lists of restaurants — there was a lot of intersection,” Cober said of the trip.
The resulting restaurant, which embraces different regions of Mexico, benefits from this cultural exploration. Joe Realmuto, also the restaurant group’s executive chef, took notice of the ceviche found while traveling abroad.
“[Joe] had been working on ceviches and crudos and aguachiles for a while, like a year. But I think that after we went to Mexico City, he changed it up a little bit,” said Cober. “What we ended up putting on our menu were not any of the ones that he thought were going on the menu when he was testing them out.”
On a recent Wednesday night, that foresight was evident. A local sea scallop ceviche, bathed in citrus and punctuated by potent onion, was among the restaurant’s most stunning offerings.
The food is not the sole element reinforced by a physical trip to Mexico. The bar program also speaks to the travel embedded in Coche Comedor.
“One of the things I noticed,” Cober said, “is that, in Mexico City, when you order a margarita, it is mostly made with mezcal.”
Authentically, Coche Comedor boasts an entire section of mezcals on its bar menu, in addition to a curated (and vast) selection of tequilas. On a busy holiday weekend, the group sold a staggering number of drinks, only a handful of which were made with something other than the two agave spirits. It helps, too, that Coche Comedor has embraced the camp, with the installation of a frozen margarita machine (no other Honest Man establishment sells frozen drinks). Swirly, cold cocktails come in grown-up rocks glasses and, for a few dollars extra, can be enhanced with a liqueur floater — the sour cherry and black currant can do no wrong.
Dishes are shareable, an idea reinforced by the group’s trip abroad.
“More people don’t order dishes for themselves,” Mark Smith, Honest Man partner, said. “They share.”
Faced with the tragedy of a long menu and only one stomach, I saw the brilliance in expanding my options, too. And so, my husband’s transportive dishes became my own, as we attacked, tortillas in hand, our table ground zero for a full-throated investigation of the menu. Brought to Mexico by proxy, from the comfort of our two-top in Amagansett, we took it all in: the expertly charred octopus, the fat-crisp half duck, the juice-submerged pork barbacoa — all of it. I thought of what Christy Cober had said to me the day before, about how tortillas create a necessary engagement with food.
“A lot of the time, you’re using it in your meal,” she said.
It was, I decided, an inspired way to eat.