For the last few weeks, the zagging, oblong bar has been remarkably busy at Hellbender, the perplexing little restaurant that has been operating behind artisanally shuttered windows, guarded by a bouncer straight out of a midtown bottle service club, inside what was once a pastel-colored brunch spot called the Acre.
Announced late last month by way of a post on Vox’s Eater blog, the spot is the newest business venture by the same stable of Manhattan chefs-turn-investors who opened Rolo’s back in 2021. This is notable; their somewhat Italian, somewhat New American spot, also down the street, had announced their collective departure from Gramercy Tavern. The group was now inside the shell of a long-shuttered candy store in Ridgewood, and this had attracted notice from from Pete Wells, who cautiously recommended their “remarkable range,” and a litany of aspiring TikTok food influencers followed, following the recommendation of local actor-cum-heartthrob Jeremy Allen White, who plays a chef on TV and has used that office to repeatedly endorse the place. One hopes chef gets those smashed $18 burgers on the house.
Success, it seems, must beget more. Brad Thomas Parsons, a minor writer in the drinks world, would repeatedly describe Hellbender on his own blog as the latest in the “Rolo’s extended universe.” While Rolo’s remains an aggressively silly idea, it nonetheless serves a sort of purpose, best described to me by a longtime Queens native who told me that even upper-lower-middle-class types deserve to go somewhere to celebrate their birthday. It’s harder to say the same of Hellbender, where the food manages to somehow both be quite expensive and largely unremarkable.
Touted, somewhat, as the local debut of LA transplant Yara Herrera, the best that can be said about her debut menu is its length, which runs deliberately short at roughly half a page. The length might point to more of a bar food concept — the group is quoted in that Eater post as saying that it’s “kind of like an izakaya” — but the prices will largely feel familiar to diners at certified dining spot Rolo’s. Nothing runs south of $10, and a plate of chips and guac goes for the price of a Manhattan-priced cocktail.
The guac is tenderly made, if largely tasteless. Disappointingly, it is nowhere near as good as the guac Herrera made at her last gig, where she “overhauled the menu” at a hipster-Tacombe style spot called Sobre Masa. Nevertheless, it points, vaguely, in the same general, ambient direction of a kind of authentically gentrified experience. If you look ahead, you’ll see that the aesthetically-minded group has installed a stuffed jaguar — behind glass, so you can’t touch it, Museum of Natural History-style — at one of the tables. In lieu of anything as undignified as slapping its name on a sign, next to the door there is just the neon-lit titular hellbender, a kind of salamander that sounds rather exotic but is native to most of the east coast. The mind wanders.
For better or worse, the location’s prior operators had turned a once quiet street corner into a well-meaning brunch spot, splashed with bright natural lights. The Rolo’s people have spent the past year painting all of that black, keeping the blinds closed at all hours, in order to evoke the ambiance of what they are calling a “nighttime cafe.” This gives customers the chance to avoid looking at the rest of the neighborhood, and evokes the uncanny feeling of sitting at a faceless basement bar on St. Marks Place.
It’s funny, someone thinking that a corner, literally across the street from the local, colorful chicken spot Super Pollo, up the street from the cocktail bar Sundown, and blocks away from busy bar food spots like Cozy Corner and I Like Food, the latter home to some of the most innovative bar food in the city, has been somehow asking for higher-priced competition. This has, however, become de rigueur for landlord and real estate developer Kermit Westergaard, who rents out the spot, among others he has retrofitted in the area. More recently, he’s quietly announced plans to open an Italian spot a few blocks away, where another one of his former restaurant-owning tenants have left, which has become an interesting pattern for the divisive developer.
Not unlike, say, the branding of natural wine — Westergaard also rents out one of those places too — Herrera’s menu tasks itself with convincing people they are eating something that is mildly profound. Instead of the kinds of mozzarella sticks you can pick up anywhere else, Herrera makes fried “oaxacan cheese” sticks that taste like mozzarella sticks and cost $14. For a few dollars more, you can pick up a shrimp cocktail in a pool of pico de gallo, or a fried fish sandwich that is about as flavorful and greasy as Popeyes’ recently rebooted flounder.
The funniest thing on the menu is the sticky choriqueso (“the sure-to-be-bestseller,” according to at least one blogger) which comes largely burnt into a thick pan, accompanied by soft brown, nixtamalized heirloom corn tortillas, allegedly one of the few places in the entire country where you can find this. Perhaps, this is why the plate is one the most expensive things Herrera makes, at $22 a plate. Somehow, the tortillas taste bitter. Filled with the burnt queso, they combine to make for a sort of makeshift slop taco.
The pleasantly mustached Tony Milici, who makes drinks both at Rolo’s and Hellbender, can be found most nights at the latter trying to manage the crowded bar. Online, he says they are largely branding the place as a bar. He has put together, in fact, no fewer than five different kinds of margaritas that run from $14 to $18. For about the same price, you can also get an enormous glass filled with something Milici calls the “taxidermied jaguar,” and which tastes like very fancy fruit juice.
The crowding around the bar is deliberate on his part. He convinces the Eater blogger to write that Hellbender will eschew “conversations around gentrification” because “the set-up skews more casual,” something tied to his choice to eschew table service. Somehow, the argument goes, paying $24 for lamb carnitas is more accessible when done at a bar.
All of this is disappointing, and it’s not really the fault of Herrera, who means well and whose work is not really served by trying to fit inside the overall Rolo’s project of increasing the price of surrounding real estate. The food will, one imagines, will eventually improve, though her ideas and painfully earnest improvisations (chamoy! with asian pears!) feel like they should be sold on a menu that takes them seriously. Hopefully, she will leave this place and make better and more interesting food elsewhere, as chefs who get profiled by inspirational blogs tend to do. The difference felt at Hellbender will likely not be noticeable.
The quality, at any rate, doesn’t really matter. In an interview, Milici says the main idea behind the bar was to fleece customers while they’re waiting for tables at Rolo’s, inviting customers to “ride out their wait for a table with us here.” It’s a kind of synergy that feels ill-conceived. There are no fewer than five other bars in the surrounding quarter mile radius, though I suppose the shuttered blinds might cover the view. More than anything else, the project paints a portrait of what mid-tier gentrification looks like, promulgating a kind of signification that comes from nowhere and tastes like nothing.
Hellbender is located at 68-22 Forest Avenue. Keep up with their hours via their Instagram.
Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.
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