Café Mars

[From the 8/28/23 newsletter]

On Saturday night, we went to a hot new restaurant, Cafe Mars, in Gowanus with our pals Mark and Diana.

I first heard about Café Mars when Helen Rosner wrote about it in The New Yorker. The dish that got me hooked was this starter of Negroni jello shots with a floating olive inside:

As Helen writes: “They are—this is an unreserved compliment—completely horrifying, an exercise in absurdism. The flavor is fantastic, bright and briny, but the firm flesh of the olive and the blobbily collapsing gelatin combine in the mouth to create a visceral texture that I loathed bodily and also immediately wanted to experience again.”

Exactly. (Though two of the four dinner guests at our table said they would never want to try them again.)

I loved everything that we ate at Café Mars. This pasta had shrimp and Calabrian chilies and was spicy and fun to eat. But the dish that blew us away was the smoked pork rib Parmesan with spaghetti salad! (That deserves an exclamation mark.)

I mean. Smoked pork ribs. Breaded and deep fried. Then covered with sauce and cheese and broiled. And a cold spaghetti salad that was sort of like macaroni salad but with fried mortadella? This is worth a flight to New York.

And then there was this wild watermelon pudding for dessert:

It sounds complex, but it was essentially sweetened watermelon juice thickened with corn starch and yet it was refreshing and summery and surprising and inevitable. Café Mars is a winner, through and through.

Café Mars / 272 3rd Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11215 / (347) 987-4225