Monster mash
Oti (Lower East Side)
RESTAURANTS • First Person
Don’t be scared off by the overgrown, clownish monster face that graces the front window of Oti, the narrow restaurant that opened off Clinton Street on the Lower East Side in 2023. It’s been quietly delighting diners ever since.
It’s all the more remarkable that the culinary force of choice is an unlikely one: Romanian cuisine. Chef and co-owner Elyas Popa, was born in Romania, grew up in California, and says he cooks dishes inspired by his mother and grandmother. Eating here feels and tastes like if southern California and Romania somehow collided.
On a recent visit, I perched myself at the bar — the best place in the house if you’re alone or with one other dining companion — where I watched and chatted with Popa as he cooked away in a makeshift kitchen that mostly consists of an induction stove and a cooking torch. The short menu is long on taste: Mici are finger-shaped, juicy minced lamb-and-beef sausages, much plumper than their Balkan brethren (such as the thinner Bosnian variety). Here, they’re umami flavor bombs, unleashing a fatty, smoky flavor across the palate.
The “broken burrata” combines gooey southern Italian cheese with soft, tangy Romanian telemea cheese, plus a few sprinkles of yuzu and a bit of lovage and tomato, into something that hits creamy, salty, acidic, and sweet notes all at once. But the dish I wanted to order seconds (or even thirds of) is the mămăligă, a polenta dish that’s the staple of the Romanian diet and often forgettable in its blandness. Not here. Popa adds in a healthy dose of parmesan, and spikes it with bone broth and miso for deeper, heftier flavors.
Manager and co-owner Dania Kim seems to make it her personal mission to bond with every diner inside the restaurant’s sparsely decorated white brick walls, walking everyone through the menu with a disarming charm that makes you want to cheer for this underdog of a restaurant. By the time you walk out, you might have even warmed up to the goofy monster face in the front window. –David Farley
→ Oti (Lower East Side) • 40 Clinton St • Mon-Sat 5-10p • Reserve.