The first plate to land on the table at Casa Enrique is a bowl of what looks like fossilized macaroni and cheese. It turns out to be chicharrines, a Mexican street snack, squiggles of wheat flour deep-fried until they puff up like pork cracklings.
The last plate might well be a dark chocolate pot de crème, on top of which stand three thick Maria biscuits, instantly recognizable by their constellations of docker holes and Greek key trim. For the chef, Cosme Aguilar, they are the cookies of childhood: the Mexican version of the madeleine.
Casa Enrique opened last year in Long Island City, Queens, a block from the No. 7 train stop and the French bistro Café Henri, where Mr. Aguilar worked for 10 years. (Both establishments, along with Café Henri in the West Village, are owned by Winston Kulok and his wife, Carole Bergman Kulok, and feature the Kuloks’ pet Maltese in their logos — in the case of Casa Enrique, wearing a sombrero.)
Mr. Aguilar, who was born in Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, has spent much of his professional life cooking French food. Here he brings polish to Mexican classics without tampering with their essence.
At times the freshness of the ingredients startles. Guacamole is mostly avocado, minimally interfered with. Slivers of raw jicama and scarlet and golden beets are dressed with nothing but lemon and white balsamic vinegar.
This provides balance for the earthier dishes: hard-boiled eggs tucked inside albondigas (meatballs) molded from a blend of short rib, brisket and chuck, and lamb shank rubbed with pulla chiles and ground guaje seeds, oniony and sour-sweet like black garlic. Strips of rajas (poblano chiles), roasted over an open flame, grow tender and meaty under the influence of crema (Mexican sour cream) in the enchiladas doña Blanca, named after Mr. Aguilar’s mother, who gave him the recipe.
Judged on looks alone, cochinito Chiapaneco (pork ribs, Chiapan-style) could be a dish at any Mexican restaurant: meat hunkered in a sea of thick, brown sauce, the border between sauce and black beans invisible, the yellow-tinged rice riddled with peas and carrot cubes. But the gradations of sweetness and heat multiply, from the pork’s long steeping in a paste of fruity guajillo chiles, cinnamon, allspice and a house-made pineapple vinegar left to ferment for three months.
Even the perennial rice and beans are noteworthy, the rice enriched with chicken stock, garlic and serrano chiles (or, for vegetarians, corn broth and epazote, with its flicker of licorice) and loaded with fresh peas and nubs of carrot, the beans cooked in a pan still sticky with the caramelized drippings of charred onions.
Mr. Aguilar makes his own tostadas and sopes, coarse halos of fried masa. They are platforms for crab bright with lime and cilantro, and for crumbled house-made chorizo, stitched with cinnamon and guajillo, pulla and arbol chiles, and spiked with more of that pineapple vinegar.
There are less memorable efforts. A mole has more sweetness than depth. Fish is served over corn kernels afloat in a corn broth, a meek version of esquites, lacking the usual vivid synthesis of mayonnaise and lime. Tacos, built on tortillas from Plaza Piaxtla in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and packed with the likes of mesquite-smoked chicken, slow-cooked brisket and delicately battered fish, are puzzlingly dry.
Mr. Aguilar’s older brother, Luis, watches the front of the house, where the servers eddy unobtrusively. The pale concrete floors and white walls read as either chic or stark, depending on whether you’re sitting in the cramped back room or up front at the gorgeous planked communal table.
I wished there were more dishes on the menu from Chiapas, a region underrepresented among New York’s Mexican restaurants. But Cosme Aguilar’s upbringing took him across Mexico, and his menu ranges accordingly. He approaches the food not as a scholar, but as a native speaker. Elsewhere in town, higher-profile chefs who came to Mexican food later in life are embracing it as their own. At Casa Enrique, Mr. Aguilar is experiencing a kind of homecoming.
Casa Enrique
5-48 49th Avenue (Vernon Boulevard), Long Island City, Queens; (347) 448-6040.
RECOMMENDED Beet and jicama salad, sopes de chorizo, albondigas, tostadas de jaiba, enchiladas doña Blanca, cochinito Chiapaneco, chamorro de borrego al huaxmole.
PRICES $8 to $25.
OPEN Nightly for dinner; brunch Saturday and Sunday.
RESERVATIONS Accepted.
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Entrance level with sidewalk, but restroom is downstairs and does not have handrail.
