Blanca, the Brooklyn tasting counter that since 2012 has served rarefied and highly individual cooking under the glassy stare of a taxidermic tuna head, will close at the end of the week.
Carlo Mirarchi, one of the owners and the original chef, said that the landlord had decided not to renew the lease on Blanca’s building.
With 12 seats inside a low-slung cinder-block building spray-painted with murals of a mutant insect and a masked raccoon stealing a slice of pizza, Blanca can seem like a mirage, an unlikely oasis of comfort and creativity that might at any moment melt back into the industrial jumble of its Bushwick streetscape.
To get there, diners have to walk through the raucous and rustic mess hall of Roberta’s pizzeria, take a left at the shipping containers that house a podcast studio, turn right at the tented tiki bar and descend several steps to a side entrance.
Inside are cushy leather bar seats facing a cavernous kitchen where a small crew prepares $198 menus that might take in hand-folded seaweed tortelli, well-aged pheasant patiently grilled over Japanese charcoal and Alaskan king crabs, which are sometimes seen alive and wriggling, at least at the start of the meal.
Anybody in the place can stroll over to the Technics turntable and spin one of the stacks of records brought in by the owners, cooks, servers and customers, which gives Blanca something of the feel of a small, relaxed party in the rec room of a 1970s suburban basement.
In the end, this singular mix of low-key vibes and high-stakes cuisine survived for 13 years, winning attention in New York City and abroad.
The year it opened, when Mr. Mirarchi took the tasting menus he had been serving one night a week at Roberta’s and fleshed them out for the new restaurant, I wrote in The Times that “the abundance of courses is Roman, the structure of the meal is Italian, the rigorous minimalism of the cooking is Japanese and the easy and improbable grace with which it all hangs together is unmistakably American.” Two stars were attached to that review. In 2015, when the highs in the menu were even higher and the lows were almost nonexistent, I reviewed it again, tacking on a third star.
After a long pandemic hiatus, Blanca bounced back in 2024 under a new chef, Victoria Blamey. The rigor remained, but minimalism gave way to an intense and elaborate inventiveness. Drawing on her Chilean childhood and her training in forward-thinking kitchens like Mugaritz and Corton, she cooked, among other things, crab empanadas laced with fermented black beans, ají dulce peppers and a sweet trickle of Chartreuse.
A few months later, in my ranking of my 100 favorite restaurants in New York City, I placed it in the No. 2 spot.
Nearly everything on the menu has changed since then except the crab empanada and the tortilla de rescoldo, based on a Chilean flatbread traditionally baked in campfire ashes. Ms. Blamey fires hers in Roberta’s wood-burning pizza oven after augmenting the dough with pork cracklings.
“Every American is so excited when you say it has pork chicharrones,” she said. Not everyone reacts this way, though. “When you tell French people, they look at you with disbelief.”
Ms. Blamey has won enthusiastic reviews for her artful and provocative cooking at a string of restaurants that did not survive long. She went from Chumley’s to Gotham Bar & Grill to Mena, all of them gone now.
She is unsure what she will do next. “I think I’m a very flexible person that has learned to pivot many times,” she said. “Maybe I have to open my horizons to something not in New York.”
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Pete Wells was the restaurant critic for The Times from 2012 until 2024. He was previously the editor of the Food section. More about Pete Wells
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