Sobre Masa – Bushwick's Temple to Heirloom Corn

Sobre Masa sits on Harrison Place in Bushwick, between Morgan and Knickerbocker Avenues, in a building that is as much tortilla factory as restaurant. Behind a wall of glass, heirloom Mexican corn is nixtamalized, milled and pressed into tortillas that anchor almost everything on the menu; beyond that, a 60-seat dining room opens under a skylight. The restaurant grew out of a pandemic-era tortilla pop-up into what its own founders call the first tortilleria in New York City built solely on imported Mexican heirloom corn, run by chef-owners Zack and Diana Wangeman, a husband-and-wife team raised in Oaxaca. Zack trained as a pastry chef at Jean-Georges and Per Se before turning his attention to masa; Diana, a doctor by training, left medicine to help run the business. The MICHELIN Guide has kept Sobre Masa on its Bib Gourmand list since 2022, the designation for good quality, good value cooking, and it holds the distinction again in the 2025 New York selection.

01The room and the setting

Walk past the retail shelves and the glass-enclosed kitchen, and the space opens into a dining room for sixty, anchored by a horseshoe-shaped bar beneath a bright skylight.

Overhead hangs a cluster of hand-crafted kites by the Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo, hung in the rafters above a rug woven by Diana's father on one wall. Corn sacks are stacked throughout the building — upwards of 20,000 pounds at a time — a reminder that this is a working tortilleria as much as a restaurant.

02The chef

Zack Wangeman and his wife Diana are the chef-owners; both were raised in Oaxaca, and together they built what the restaurant describes as the first tortilleria in New York City to work solely with imported Mexican heirloom corn.

Insider tip

Dinner Tue–Sun; reservations via OpenTable; walk-ins welcome; near Morgan Ave L train.

Zack trained as a pastry chef, moving from Mexico to Manhattan in 2010 to work at Jean-Georges and Per Se, and later at Meadowood in California, before turning that training toward corn and masa. Diana qualified as a doctor in Oaxaca, splitting her time between practising medicine and working in her mother's restaurants before joining Zack in New York.

The idea became a business in hard circumstances: in March 2020, as the pandemic shut the city down, Zack's mother died in Mexico. He drew up a business plan, moved back to New York that May, and opened a tortilla pop-up in Williamsburg while scouting a permanent home in Bushwick; by December, Diana had agreed to join him. The Harrison Place tortilleria opened its doors on 19 October 2021, and the restaurant joined the MICHELIN Guide's Bib Gourmand list the following year, one of eighteen new additions to the 2022 New York selection.

03The cooking

The kitchen nixtamalizes its own corn daily, working with a rotating selection of more than a dozen heirloom varieties imported from Mexican farmers, rather than the handful of hybrid breeds used in most mass-produced tortillas.

That process — soaking, grinding and cooking dried corn into masa — is treated as the restaurant's core craft, a nod to tradition that shapes everything else on the menu. The kitchen's instinct is to honour old techniques while cooking with a contemporary hand, so a plate of carnitas or ceviche sits easily alongside dishes built from Zack's fine-dining background.

04What to order

Start with the octopus aguachile, dressed with jícama, cucumber, avocado and chile morita, or the fluke ceviche with sweet potato and leche de tigre. The huarache arrives topped with maitake mushrooms, mole amarillo and hoja santa oil, while the barbacoa — lamb belly, served with a green chepiche salsa and warm tortillas — shows the kitchen's quieter register.

The pork shank is carnitas built in the style of Michoacán, pulled apart with pickled red onion and cilantro; the mole almendrado, built on charred broccolini and almond mole, is the vegetable-forward main. For dessert, the flan and the mil hojas — puff pastry layered with dulce de leche and apple — close the meal on familiar Mexican ground.

05Wine and drinks

The bar rewards sitting at it: bartenders are often testing new drinks on guests willing to try them, and the list leans on mezcal and tequila, with gin and rum given room to play. It is a fitting match for a kitchen that treats Mexican produce and technique as the whole point, rather than a theme.

06When to go and the neighbourhood

Sobre Masa serves dinner Tuesday to Saturday from 6pm to 10pm, stretching to 11pm on Fridays and Saturdays, with Sunday service from 1pm to 8pm and brunch specials between 1pm and 3pm; reservations run through OpenTable, though walk-ins are always welcome.

The restaurant sits two blocks from the Morgan Avenue stop on the L train, in a stretch of Bushwick often described as one of Brooklyn's taco capitals. Its tortillas now travel well beyond Harrison Place, sold wholesale at shops including The Meat Hook and Marlow & Daughters in Williamsburg and Murray's Cheese in Manhattan — proof that the corn obsession started here runs through the rest of the city's kitchens too.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.