Molonay Tubilderborst Pops Up at Senor Fish on Friday

By Elina Shatkin Tue., Nov. 1 2011 at 10:38 AM

Categories: Pop-up Restaurants, Restaurant Openings

Courtesy of Nick Coe

A dish from Molonay Tubilderborst (left), chef Nick Coe (right).

Molonay Tubilderborst, the oddly named pocket restaurant we told you about last month from Black Cat Bakery chef Nick Coe, launches this Friday.

More an embedded mini-restaurant than a temporal pop-up (Coe hopes), Molonay Tubilderborst splits the Little Tokyo location of Senor Fish into two sections: one with fish tacos, etc. from the standard menu and the other, a 32-seat space featuring Coe's experimental, produce-centric menu. A French/Uzbekistani culinary mashup? Sure, Coe's got it, at least for now. The menu will change every week based on what Coe can get from his growers.

The debut menu at Coe's experiment in fine dining features starters ($8-11) of Turkish eggplant fritters, yellow fava soup and a salad of persimmon, fennel and chorizo. Mains ($16-27) include winter squash ravioli, mussels steamed with apples and beef short ribs "Paris-Tashkent." Dessert ($8-10) includes spiced caramel apple pie and Parmesan pound cake.

For Coe, it seems like a chance to cut loose in the kitchen, to experiment with flavor combinations that wouldn't suit the Black Cat menu and, most significantly, to source rare ingredients and let them shine. As Coe told us back in October, "I'm trying to stay very uncomplicated because I'm going to enormous lengths to get really special ingredients. It's the opposite of the whole molecular approach to food."

Molonay Tubilderborst, the most unwieldy name since Wirtshaus (it's not a bracelet boutique called "wrist-house"), will be open three nights a week, Thursday through Saturday, beginning next week. Reservations will be available only by email.