El Fish Marisquería – a Mexican fish market lands on Amsterdam Avenue

El Fish Marisquería occupies a corner that the Upper West Side had almost forgotten: 155 Amsterdam Avenue at 67th Street, two blocks from Lincoln Center, on a stretch of residential towers that for years held no proper sit-down restaurant at all. Chef Julian Medina, the Mexico City-born cook behind Toloache and Yerba Buena, opened it with restaurateur Louis Skibar as a marisquería built on the memory of a market trip to Ensenada rather than a tasting-menu idea of Mexico. The room runs to 1,500 square feet, split by a brick arch into a 60-seat dining room with its own oyster bar and a 15-seat cocktail bar, finished in blue and pale-green tile that carries the sea theme through from bar to table. It is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide, the mark the inspectors give restaurants they consider worth the detour.

01The room and the setting

The brief was oceanic and the room keeps it. A vintage mahogany bar trimmed in gold brass anchors the 15-seat cocktail side, while blue sea-inspired tiles and plants carry the theme through the brick arch into the 60-seat dining room and oyster bar on the other side, in the calming blue and pale-green palette the owners chose to put the restaurant in dialogue with the coast rather than the Upper West Side street outside.

The space is air-conditioned, wheelchair accessible and set up for counter dining as well as table service, and it doubles for catering and private events — useful on a corner that, as neighbourhood guides note, sits a demure, almost easy-to-miss exterior over an interior far more expansive than the block suggests.

02The chef

Julian Medina learned to cook watching his father and grandfather in Mexico City, then trained professionally at Hacienda de Los Morales and Les Celebrites in the Hotel Nikko before Richard Sandoval invited him to New York in 1996 to work in his kitchens. He opened his own first restaurant, Toloache, in August 2007, followed a year later by Yerba Buena in the East Village.

Insider tip

Brunch weekends 11:30am–3pm; dinner nightly from 4:30pm; reservations recommended.

For El Fish, Medina went back to Mexico's fishing capital, Ensenada, visiting fish and farmers' markets to source the ingredients he needed to rework traditional marisquería dishes for a seafood-first menu rather than a taqueria one — the trip that gives the restaurant its name and its raw-bar backbone.

03The cooking

The menu is built in the marisquería order: a raw bar of East and West Coast oysters, littleneck clams and peel-and-eat shrimp with lime, tajín and ají verde; then ceviches and tostadas such as the Tostada de Atún and the crab, shrimp and octopus Tostada Ensenada; then a para empezar list of grilled octopus with crispy sweet potato and yuzu kosho adobo, baked clams with chorizo, and lobster-pumpkin bisque.

Mains run from a whole fried boneless black bass (Pescado Frito) in garlic-chili sauce to Fideo Seco — Mexican noodles with lobster, black truffle and a tomato-chipotle cream — and salmon skewers dressed in a peanut Kung Pao salsa, alongside a weekend brunch menu of chilaquiles, a lobster breakfast burro and bagel towers with house-made gravlax.

04What to order

Start at the raw bar, or share the Tostada Ensenada or the Lobster Aguachile with its peanut butter-yuzu sauce and crispy wonton. The Tuna Taquitos (toro tartar, avocado-mayo, chili oil) and the smoked-marlin Yucatan Fish Dip are the other reliable openers on the para empezar list.

From the mains, the Fideo Seco and the whole Pescado Frito are the dishes the kitchen is built around; for a table that wants the full raw-bar spread in one order, El Fish lists an El Grande Platter of oysters, clams, tuna taquitos, peel-and-eat shrimp and lobster aguachile.

05The neighbourhood

Amsterdam Avenue between West 60th and West 70th had, before El Fish opened, essentially no sit-down restaurants — a stretch of residential towers with a wine bar, a Starbucks and little else. The Upper West Side more broadly runs on long-standing Italian-American rooms and neighbourhood wine bars rather than new openings, which is part of why a Mexican seafood room on this corner reads as unusual.

The address — the corner of 67th and Amsterdam — puts the restaurant two minutes from Lincoln Center, and it is used accordingly, as a pre- or post-performance table for people heading to the opera, ballet or philharmonic rather than a destination requiring its own trip downtown.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.