NYC's Most Hyped Mexican Restaurant has the City's Best Tortilla

Corima is dedicated to Northern Mexico.

People eat with their eyes,

and some stuff can be offputting.

In order for you to submerge yourself

into what we have to offer,

it's just much easier to not show you a menu.

Sometimes it feels like if you read it,

you don't wanna eat it.

We just believe that you can trust us.

We earned our first Michelin star 11 months in of opening.

And our mission in this restaurant is to discover

what Mexican cuisine is, was, and it could be.

We believe that Mexican cuisine

deserves a seat at the table of fine dining,

and we're here to represent it.

[upbeat music]

Hello guys, my name is Fidel Caballero,

chef owner of Corima here in Chinatown, New York City.

Come on in. We got a long prep list.

Corima is 54 seats.

We usually do about a hundred covers.

We have two different menus, we have tasting and a la carte.

I'm gonna start doing some animal butchery.

Let's go get the whole lamb.

So this is where we keep any product of ferments,

our misos, garums, and lacto-fermentation.

Down under we have these beautiful

dry aged pork that we serve.

We truly believe on dry aging our proteins.

And today we're gonna do this guy.

We usually order to get slaughtered as soon as we order 'em.

We do put like about 10 days of dry age on it

before we even get to butchering.

With age, it kind of tenderizes it.

We designed this kitchen in a circular way,

where we can all share techniques, stories,

our personal lives,

and we usually prep around this table,

making it a little more cohesive.

And then this is comal where all the tortillas are done.

We use a wok to cook our tortillas.

First of all, we drink some mate.

Mate is tea that it's very caffeinated.

South America drinks a lot of it.

I guess it's the next step after drinking so much coffee.

When coffee like stops doing the thing,

you lean into harder stuff like mate.

This is Ezequiel Corona, he's our CDC, our chef de cuisine.

You know, one of the talented chefs I've ever worked with.

We're gonna break down this lamb, today's lamb.

We like to break the whole animal together

so we can actually determine how fatty it is.

People always want ribeyes, people always want strips.

Nobody really talks about chucks, you know,

and chucks are like shoulders,

like beef shoulders are so beautiful,

and that's why we get whole animals

because we can decide how to butcher, how fresh it is.

All this fat gets rendered to cook our morels

instead of buying lamb fat to do what we want.

But we'd rather just get the lamb, you know?

I mean, come on, look at the freshness.

Like, the organs are like, that's the heart.

The heart's like, super beautiful.

That's why we never share a menu at the beginning

because again, we believe that we can make like,

lamb hearts pretty tasty, you know.

We should have a duck heart taco,

people were super skeptical

and when they had it, people were just so obsessed with it.

The way we prepare it, and again, it's sustainability,

people throw away the organs.

Organs are delicious.

The dish that we're doing now, it's a lamb taco,

it's a morel stuffed with morcilla sausage.

It's a meatball.

We serve it with a puree

made out of Italian artichoke hearts.

Serve it with raw artichokes sliced very thinly,

some wild spring onions, some jalapeno vinegar,

and finish it with miner's lettuce.

Serve it in a blue corn masa tortilla.

Sometimes people add like fat or butter.

We use brain in our sausage.

You know, we use it to kind of cream out the sausage.

When we're processing it and seasoning it,

we don't wanna use a lot of fat,

'cause then it just melts inside of the morel

when we do the sausage.

Well, lamb's looking awesome.

You know, we're kind of pretty much done

with the whole animal butchery.

Now it's time to head to tortilla production.

[upbeat music]

Now we're gonna check on Selvin.

He's our mastermind behind the tortillas.

We do something a little not so typical,

a sourdough flour tortilla.

It's usually made with lard.

Flour tortillas, when we were a popup

we did it with chicken fat,

and then when we opened the restaurant,

we wanted for it to be for everyone

and for vegetarians as well.

And we decided to switch to butter.

This is a sourdough starter that we had

for many, many years.

6-year-old sourdough starter.

His name is Juanito. [laughs]

In the North, there's different types of flour tortillas.

I'm from Chihuahua myself.

The concept of Corima is from Chihuahua.

We decided that the best tortilla, don't tell my grandma,

but it's from Sonora, you know, it's like the best one.

So the sourdough's for flavor more than anything,

we wanted something tangy.

And this is kind of our take on bread and butter.

We serve one tortilla,

and that's when like dinner really starts.

It's when you grab the tortilla

and you like, you hand somebody like a piece of bread,

and I think it's a beautiful thing.

It talks community, it talks in what we believe in.

And right now we do kind of a mix between the flour,

the butter, and the water.

Our butter is also mixed between Hokkaido butter,

Chihuahuan Amish butter, and New York state butter.

A little bit of salt and then we add the sourdough starter.

It turns into kind of like a batter,

so it's very hard to handle.

That's why we decided to, you know,

kind of like press them beforehand.

It was so hard to roll them. We were rolling them before.

It's not just a press, it's actually a comal,

it's a hot press, like shirt printing.

It's two different planchas

that heat up and sets the tortilla.

And when we cook it we'd spray the bottom

and the top of our plancha,

and then we just like press it very quickly

about three seconds.

We then we bring it upstairs for service

and we cook it on an upside down wok.

It takes about like 25 seconds to cook this tortilla.

So the reason why we part cook it is to shape it.

It's much easier to manipulate it during service.

We heat this up about 98 Celsius.

The hardest part of the tortillas

is about to happen right now, which is portioning it.

It's like, you know, trying to hold water, you know,

with your hands and kind of weigh water

and like kind of shape it.

So Selvin and I, we're gonna portion some of those right now

and then we're gonna come over here and press them.

So we usually spray our hands

to obviously maintain them sticking.

[upbeat music]

We're gonna let Selvin keep on with his tortilla making

while we butcher some fish.

Right now on the menu we do have Spanish turbot. Beautiful.

We also put an age on turbot for 10 days.

We do serve it with corn husk sauce,

with this liquor that we like to use called Nixta,

and caviar, some plankton as well.

The plankton recently was brought to us

by the fish company that we use.

We try to make a film with it.

I think turbot's one of my favorite fish to serve.

Right now, we're poaching in vermouth very lightly.

We usually grill it as well. It takes grill very well.

I think turbot is one of those versatile fishes,

and it's very meaty.

I mean, flatfish is probably one

of the easiest ones to break down for me.

It kind of like already tells you where it is.

I like to do the incision first in the middle,

go around this side, kind of mark it.

The whole kitchen is very into turbot.

Some of us have 'em on the wall,

some of us even have tattoos of it.

Chef Monster has a tattoo of... [laughs]

Big fans of turbot. [laughs]

There's a lot of people that kind of wanna take pictures

of the kitchen team after dinner.

It started becoming like, kind of like a joke

of like wearing like different props.

Melvin, can you put your hat on?

His name is Melvin, he's a grill chef,

and he does meat roasts, and, you know,

so sometimes he cooks with a hat, you know,

he's the French cowboy.

He's French and so, you know, he wears this cool hat,

you know, look at him.

We're done with the butchery of the fish.

[upbeat music]

Sofia, my wife, and we're opening up a bar,

you know, down the street,

kind of the extension of Corima.

So we're doing the finishing touches at the bar.

It's called Chucho.

So we're just gonna check it out,

kinda do the finishing touches.

What's up, player? What's up man? How we doing?

Good to see you. You good?

We're here to meet with Jesse Kranzler,

he's a project manager.

And Vince, which is our GM,

and we're gonna finish up the last touches before we open.

We open in 10 days, so we got pictures on Sunday.

So we're there.

Maybe this color paper? What do you think?

Or you like white?

I like yellow. Yellow?

I like the Market St, like the thing,

'cause it's very Instagrammable,

and people already like know-

Even if they're here, they know what address it is.

They don't have to read it, so.

Exactly. You wanna see the kitchen?

Yeah, let's do it.

Hey, [speaks Spanish].

This is Chef Hector, he's a chef of Bar Chucho.

We started with the idea of making one taco

like a month before we opened.

I decided to do a whole different menu,

and now we have this like, I think a very awesome menu.

[Jesse] We put art up here.

Wow!

Yeah, like, I wasn't like completely sold on 'em.

And now that I see 'em here, they're beautiful.

The other thing that's funny,

which of course drives me crazy,

but we're like, measuring,

and then we realized yesterday

when we're actually putting these up

that these lights are completely different spacing apart.

But, who cares? You didn't notice that.

I'm gonna finish some, you know, conversations downstairs

and then we're gonna head back to Corima.

[upbeat music]

We're back at Corima doing all the prep

that we need to do before service.

It's kind of crunch time.

We got half an hour before we do family meal,

and after family meal we slide right into service.

These are Massachusetts scallops.

They're beautiful U-10 scallops

that we use for our crudo.

The dish is kind of like reminiscent

of aguachile or ceviche.

Right now we're doing a whey and pineapple aguachile,

which is like the broth with pine.

We season the scallops with chayote squash,

a little bit of yuzu kosho, and olive oil.

Slice it, we put it between jicama.

That's our first course.

For me, scallops and shellfish is better in the winter.

We didn't wanna let this winter go by

without us using some scallops.

So they dive for them on a daily basis.

So sometimes they kinda have 'em.

So we jump in between purveyors

and we see what we like the most,

and who has them to offer and whatnot.

Now we're gonna finish this scallop.

This is the last scallop that we have.

Then we're gonna check in with the rest of the crew,

see if we can be any, you know,

if I could be of any assistance.

[upbeat music]

We're about to go into pre-service.

Now we tone down the lighting, we make it a little more zen,

it's a little more focused.

We change into our service uniforms,

and now we need to feed a hundred people.

Let's get to it.

Today on the books we have 94 guests,

43 confirmed tastings,

60 all-day unannounced tasting menus.

That gives us just shy of 70.

Please push tasting menus today.

Two-top, table 25, this is a food influencer,

about 22,000 followers on Instagram.

Now let's just make sure they have a good time.

Chef, here they come.

Everyone's here, we have extra hands, we have everything.

So food's gonna be coming out extra quick.

Only better for you guys and for your guests.

So let's please be on top of it.

On that note, happy Friday.

[All] Happy Friday!

[upbeat music]

Service is about to get a very intense,

so it's time for you guys to leave.

Thank you so much for spending time with us.