The Underground Gourmet - Put A Huevo On It

At José Andrés’s spiffy new Spanish Diner, the flavors are Iberian, but the spirit is pure greasy spoon.

- Robin Raisfeld And Rob Patronite

WHEN YOU THINK of Spanish diners in New York, you think Formica counters, fluorescent lights, and swiveling stools. You think bilingual wall menus that spell out the daily sancochos and guisados, and foillined sandwich pressers worn from decades of Cuban-sandwich smooshing. You think of Margon off Times Square. You think of Westside Coffee Shop below Canal. And you think of the late, great La Taza de Oro, a Chelsea holdout that finally closed in 2015.

You do not think of glitzy urban megadevelopments like Hudson Yards. But that is where you’ll find José Andrés’s new Spanish Diner, one of three restaurants that anchor his Mercado Little Spain food hall just below the point in the High Line where it veers west toward Twelfth Avenue. Of course, Andrés—he of more than 30 restaurants and one Nobel Peace Prize nomination—is a Spanish-born chef, and his Spanish Diner reflects his Iberian heritage. And though those Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican lunch counters and icons of New York gastronomy have historically advertised themselves as Spanish or Spanish-American, they’re more precisely rapidly disappearing pockets of Latin-Caribbean culinary culture.

But in some oddly satisfying way, the spirit of New York’s old-school Spanish diners lives on in this sleek new one, even though you could probably squeeze a dozen Taza de Oros inside the airplane-hangar

like space. Where its predecessors are cramped and homey, this one’s bright and airy, with retractable garage doors and an expanse of garden-type chairs and bare-wood tables. The whole massive undertaking has opened in stages, and at press time, the Diner was serving only breakfast and lunch.