Cassava changed Vitor Mendes’s life. After his father passed away, the chef returned to his home country of Brazil and decided to travel around the region. That’s where he learned the importance of the indigenous tropical root vegetable and how it’s a crucial
foundation of Brazilian cooking, passed down for generations.
Mendes returned to New York as a changed person with a new mission: highlighting those thrilling ingredients. And now he’s opening his own modern Brazilian restaurant, Iara, on the Lower East Side at 205 Allen Street, near East Houston Street, on Friday, October 2.
“I thought that my own culture was rice, beans, and barbecue, as a lot of people might think,” he says, but his explorations taught him otherwise. “And I just came back like a priest, telling all my friends, mentors, chefs: ‘I saw something down there that nobody has tasted before.’”
There are a dozen or so cassava flour varieties; the starch creates tapioca, and the fermented juice, tucupi, is used to cook everything.
After that life-changing trip, he started Iara as a pop-up, which caught restaurateur Tomer Blechman’s attention, who was working on opening wood-fired spot Theodora in Fort Greene at the time in 2024. The chef took a slight detour, but then returned to his goal.
Iara’s menu is laced with many Brazilian ingredients and spices, including cassava (of course), tucupi, acai, jambu (a Sichuan pepper-like herb from the Amazon), kupuasu (a cacao sibling that tastes “fruity acidic,” he explains), Brazilian tonka beans, and puxuri, a Brazilian nutmeg.
Appetizers include tapioca crisps ($16) topped with smoked trout mousse, Brazilian binquinho peppers, and jambu. The Rainforest soup is made with a tucupi broth. “It’s a vegan chicken soup on steroids,” he says.
For entrees, the moqueca ($48) is a Brazilian fish stew made with red palm dende oil, coconut milk, and tucupi, served with white rice, a Brazilian harissa, and salsa verde. The picanha con fritas ($68) comes with a 10-ounce top sirloin, charcoal-grilled, with tapioca fries. Sides include the farofa ($6), which is toasted and seasoned cassava flour.
For desserts, there’s ice cream made with kupuas; a classic Brazilian flan; and a take on toffee cake made with a warm cassava coconut cake, coconut sorbet, and warm tonka-toffee sauce.
Calvin Czypinski, who was an opening bartender at Theodora, joined Iara to create the drinks. The cocktails make use of cachaça, a Brazilian cane sugar liquor. There’s even a martini made with tucupi, and a cachaça-based beverage with pandan and lemongrass.
Iara shares its Allen Street address with other restaurants including Kisa and Don Chicken. The restaurant’s 1,600-square-foot, 50-seat space was designed by Studio WDM with furniture by Brazilian design company Sossego. (Mendes chose the name Iara from Brazilian folklore about an Amazon River mermaid known as the Mother of Waters.)
During a recent trip back to the Amazon, he connected with farmers and purveyors so they could ship him ingredients and also brought back six suitcases of objects to display around the new restaurant.
There’s also a dry-ager with fish near the front and a mural showing what Mendes explains as the “abstract form of the Amazon.”
“I hope to be a reference point for people looking for a Brazilian restaurant for a unique experience,” Mendes says. He knows New York has Brazilian restaurants, but “if they want an experience that they cannot find anywhere else outside of Brazil [where they can] experience the flavors and taste the spices and taste the things they haven’t tasted yet,” he says, they can come to Iara.
Guests can sit at the 13-seat chef’s counter, high-tops, and tables on the lower level of the dining room; the seven bar seats along the walls are available for walk-ins only.
Iara’s hours are from 5 to 11 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; book reservations on Resy.
