El Camarón Peludo opens as a seafood wine bar in NYC

El Camarón Peludo has opened at 20 Cornelia Street in Manhattan's West Village, a Mexican seafood restaurant and natural wine bar from the team behind Taqueria Ramirez.

Owners Tania Apolinar and Giovanni Cervantes built their name on roasted and slow-cooked meats at Taqueria Ramirez. For this project, they partnered with chef Carlos Barrera to shift the focus entirely to seafood, pairing it with a wine list that sources bottles from producers around the world rather than sticking to a single region.

Cervantes says the idea started small: pairing inventive seafood plates with sparkling wine for a tasting menu. Sourcing and testing kept pulling him toward a fuller list, and the one-off idea became a dedicated natural wine bar.

His idea to pair seafood with sparkling wine turned into a full natural wine bar.

Shrimp arrives daily from Sinaloa, Mexico, Ecuador and other sources, and is de-shelled and de-veined in-house for three dishes built around it. One is camarones zarandeados, a shrimp take on a Pacific-coast Mexican dish usually grilled whole on a flat wire basket; here the shrimp is finished with a red salsa stirred through mayo.

Shrimp, tuna and daily salsa

The kitchen's other signatures include a tuna tostada, built from Spanish tuna layered with spicy mayo, fish eggs, habanero-lime oil, avocado and crispy leeks, and pescadilla, a deep-fried fish taco. A shrimp taco comes with queso fresco, refried beans and roasted poblano peppers.

At the raw bar, the kitchen runs two house salsas: a parsley-based salsa verde and a salsa negro layered with habanero, piquín chile and squid ink. Both are remade each day, and Cervantes tastes each new batch against the previous week's to keep the flavor consistent before service starts.

A room built around the bar

Upstairs, the room is built around a long, winding bar where guests can watch the bartenders and kitchen work directly. Fresh seafood sits on ice in the window, and the wine is kept in chilled buckets table-side rather than behind a counter.

The pairing of Mexican coastal cooking with natural wine, instead of beer or cocktails, is still a narrow lane in New York, which makes El Camarón Peludo one of the more specific bets to open in the West Village this year. Whether the format holds will depend on whether diners come back for the wine list as much as the shrimp.

El Camarón Peludo is now open nightly at 20 Cornelia Street. More Mexican cooking at home and the city's growing natural wine scene are covered on Amuse.