Next Wave Awards Food & Beverage Program of the Year: Theodora
This feature is part of our 2024 Next Wave Awards.
On the busy stretch of Brooklyn’s Greene Avenue and the corner of Fulton Street, you’ll smell Theodora before you see it. Once you venture inside, the rest of the senses are ignited one by one. Spice-laced smoke drifts through the bustling, attractive space — “Mexico City-meets-Tel Aviv, and Tulum in the back,” as owner and head chef Tomer Blechman describes the decor — all set aglow by flickering candlelight and the open-fire kitchen’s domesticated flames.
Credit: Jeff Brown
The Fort Greene restaurant, opened in February of this year, is Blechman’s follow-up to beloved neighborhood spots Miss Ada and Nili. Rather than adhering to a purely Mediterranean or Mexican cuisine, co-owner Gerardo Estevez and Blechman’s approach — to technique and ingredients — here skews more international. In addition to the delicacies sizzling in those flames you’ll find hearty and seasonal vegetables, vibrant crudos, and the house specialty: dry-aged fish. The black cod, cooked on the open Mangal grill, arrives practically molten in a pool of miso-rich sauce; the whole butterflied trout is aged for four days, crisped in the oven, then dressed two ways with smoky harissa and a verdant, herbal chermoula. And if you’d prematurely relegated the bread course to supplementary sauce-sopping, think again. The selection — from swirly, za’atar-dusted kubaneh and toasty pita to fat loaves of sourdough — is baked fresh every day around the corner at Thea, the restaurant’s brand-new sister bakery helmed by pastry chef Christina Kavalis, and walked over for service.
Credit: Jeff Brown
“It was important for the restaurant to have a really nice bread program and there was limited space, so we looked for another spot,” says Blechman. “Luckily enough, we found Thea, and it’s really fitted to what we create over here.”
Fire is a main character at Theodora, sure, but the restaurant’s real warmth comes from the staff, many of whom have grown from entry-level positions at Blechman’s other restaurants to leaders on the team. One of them is Maggie Dahill, who went from serving at Miss Ada during the early pandemic to beverage director for the whole group, designing Theodora’s expansive wine program, which is particularly unique to the spot.
“The thing that Tomer and I were really excited to do was to center the narrative around these winemakers who we’ve worked with for years,” Dahill says. In fact, the wine list is more of a book, organized into two sections: the first half by producer, detailing the maker’s story and location with the bottles on offer; the back half is more traditional, showing off the same bottles by style and profile. The approach is equal-parts comprehensive and user-friendly.
Credit: Jeff Brown
The cocktails, devised by Dahill and Blechman with consultation from bar industry veteran Leanne Favre, are destination-worthy on their own. The headlining Martini trio shifts with the seasons; the current lineup boasts a briny gin and sherry blend dirtied with caperberries, a honeyed mezcal smokeshow, and a farmers-market-fresh take starring tomato water and dappled with verdant basil oil. Turmeric infuses the house Painkiller with earthiness and a hue as electric as its beachy profile. And the Chantico, a rye-based Old Fashioned riff, is washed with lamb fat that’s been steeped in the kitchen’s signature spice blend, a cocktail Blechman has been plotting for years.
Any one of these winning attributes — a kick-ass cocktail menu, a wine list with heart, a full-on bakery — would be enough to spark interest within New York City’s crowded restaurant scene. But Theodora is a singularly top-to-bottom operation, a self-sustaining bonfire of culinary delights that burns bright among its peers. And we’ll be flocking to its flames again and again.
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