Hav & Mar – an ocean of honey in Chelsea

Hav & Mar occupies the ground floor of the Starrett-Lehigh Building, the 1930s freight terminal on Eleventh Avenue now filled with galleries, where chef Marcus Samuelsson opened his first new Manhattan restaurant in nearly a decade. The celebrity chef behind Harlem's Red Rooster had just opened his first restaurant in the city in nearly a decade, heading downtown to Chelsea. The name of the restaurant comes from the Swedish word for ocean and the Amharic word for honey, reflecting Samuelsson's background. The kitchen calls its own idiom "Swediopian," a mix of Swedish and Ethiopian cooking built primarily around seafood. Above the tables swim Derrick Adams's Black mermaids, a series commissioned with Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma Golden as creative partner. The New York Times included Hav & Mar in a list of the city's twelve best new restaurants in 2023. It is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide, without a star. The room reads as considered rather than novelty-driven: a seafood house arguing, convincingly, that two very different coastlines can share one table.

01The room and the setting

The dining room is built around Derrick Adams's site-specific series, titled We Are From the Water Too, Black mermaids and vibrant patterns that envelop the restaurant's interior, designed by Atelier Zébulon Perron and uniting the sunbaked tones of Ethiopia's landscapes with elements of Swedish minimalism.

Adams's series features seven-and-a-half-foot tall wall-mounted sculptures made from unfinished plywood sheets with acrylic and fabric, their scales cut from bolts of fabric drawn from the artist's own digital library of collected images. "I started to really think about the mermaid as the central figure in the restaurant. It's almost like a beacon," says Adams.

02The chef

Samuelsson's path to Chelsea runs through Scandinavia and Harlem. He studied at the Culinary Institute in Gothenburg, apprenticed in Switzerland in 1989, and in France from 1992 to 1994, before arriving in New York in 1995 to apprentice at Aquavit, where he was quickly promoted to executive chef and made partner in 1997. His rise since has been nothing short of meteoric, starting with his 1999 James Beard Rising Chef Award, long before Red Rooster made him one of Harlem's best-known names.

Insider tip

Dinner only, Sunday–Saturday from 5pm; ground floor of the landmark Starrett-Lehigh Building.

Hav & Mar opened with executive chef Rose Noël, formerly of Washington, DC's Maialino Mare, leading the kitchen. Day to day, the menu is now shaped by Chef Partner Fariyal Abdullahi, whose globally inspired cooking focuses on thoughtfully sourced seafood and seasonal greenmarket produce, alongside Regional Director of Operations Tia Barrett.

03The cooking

The dish that explains the restaurant best is the Swediopian: berbere-cured salmon laid on a bed of cucumber and avocado, resting over a pool of apple water dotted with amber drops of berbere oil and black drops of ash made from repurposed vegetables. It is the one dish that will never leave the menu, the kitchen has said, because it carries the name Hav & Mar within it.

The same grammar runs through the bread basket: teff biscuits, blue cornbread, and injera crisp, served with honey butter, shiro hummus and tomato chutney. As the kitchen has put it, the cornbread speaks to Harlem, the injera to where Samuelsson was born, and the whole-wheat biscuits carry a Nordic feel.

04Wine and drinks

Beverage director Rafa García Febles built a cocktail and wine programme that features women producers, producers of colour, and purveyors that are innovatively sustainable and employ regenerative labour practices. The cocktail list runs playful: the Jet Set mixes Caribbean and Indonesian rum with hibiscus, yuzu, Swedish punsch, pineapple and lime, while the Woman King pairs Casa Dragones reposado tequila with yellow chartreuse, spiced pear, palo santo and grapefruit oil.

Behind the bar sits the Nordic spirit Aquavit, best tried in a single shot before moving on to a full highball.

05The neighbourhood

Hav & Mar sits at the corner of West 26th Street and Eleventh Avenue, within walking distance of the High Line, The Vessel, Chelsea Piers and the Whitney Museum, in the gallery blocks that first drew Derrick Adams to the project. A, C, E, 1, 2 and 3 trains stop at 34th Street–Penn Station.

The space also works as a private venue, offering vibrant private and semi-private event rooms accommodating groups as intimate as six and as grand as two hundred and fifty.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.