Emma Li
Manhattan is no stranger to good Italian food, from age-old establishments like Carbone and Del Posto, to relative upstarts like L’Artusi and Pasquale Jones.
So when a new Italian restaurant has half of Manhattan flocking across the river to Brooklyn, you know it’s something different.
On Cosme’s one-page menu, guacamole is exiled to the lower left corner, while tacos and quesadillas are banished off the sheet entirely. That alone should tell you that Cosme is not your average Mexican restaurant.
New York as a city is hard to define. New York as a school of cuisine is practically non-existent.
Enter Contra, a deeply personal vision of two young chefs, whose style of cooking manages to capture New York’s identity: modern, opinionated, and expressive, with a kind of elegant efficiency and practicality that only New York can pull off.
journeys of a gourmand 