IXTA

                                                                299 Bowery
                                                          917-732-4982
                                                           
                                                         By John Mariani

         For the past couple of years there has been a growing number of Mexican restaurants, some run by Americans, that have taken traditions of regional fare from Oaxaca, Baja, Monterey and Guadalajara and transformed them with both respect and commitment to better ingredients of the kind you find in the huge city markets south of the border.  I have every reason to believe that the growth in numbers will increase, with more and more diversity, largely because Americans are already very familiar with Mexican food in a way they are not with recent trendy cuisines like Nordic, Peruvian and Korean.
        Ixta is a fine new example on The Bowery, having taken over the crushingly loud DBGB Kitchen & Bar, which closed in 2017. You’d hardly know the place now, for what was once a lackluster and colorless room is now an evocation of bold Latino hues and decorations, including intricately hand-carved totem columns and a 12-foot hand painted Tulum-inspired jaguar named “Perla” by local artist Fernando Leon and animated NFTs projected throughout the restaurant, created by artist Ken Forbes. There are 165 seats and 10 at the bar, where the collection of tequilas and mezcals is impressive and go well in the array of exotic cocktails created by Miami native Jenny Castillo.
         On a midweek night when the place was about three-quarters full the noise level in the dining room was not bad at all, at least after the pounding techno disco music was turned down. (The owners say they are re-thinking the music.)    In search of the meaning of the name Ixta, I found that it may derive from an Aztec legend of a princess turned into the Iztacchihuatl volcano.
        Owners Mike Himani, Erol West and Marcelo Martins feature a menu with many Oaxacan dishes in modern versions by Mexico City-born chef Francisco Blanco, previously at Le Cirque. His menu is categorized under appetizers, raw bar, salads, tacos, entrees, specials and sides, and pretty much everything is made to be shared.
        You certainly want a bowl of guacamole studded with pepitas, salsa matcha and Serrano chilies ($18). Really innovative is the dish of truffled tamale tots with plenty of gooey cheese and prosciutto ($32), a dish not to be missed. Smoked and mezcal-cured salmon—not a fish I associate with any part of Mexico—came sloppily atop corn crisps with sesame and salmon roe ($26), and just didn’t work.
         What did work was a delicious, nicely seasoned tuna tostada with a Japanese Morita ponzu, creamy avocado and black sesame ($23). The best ceviche to have is the combination of catch of the day, octopus, and shrimp with jalapeño, leche de tigre citrus marinade and heirloom tostadas ($27).
         Another unusual entry is the “original birria” ($21), a dish from Jalisco, composed of slowly cooked goat’s meat that retains all its juices, guacamole mousse, corn tortillas and a salsa taquera in a consommé. Straightforward crispy hake was done with a tomato and beer-based salsa borracho, jicama slaw and flour tortilla ($21).  These are dishes fit for main courses,  and, in fact, are somewhat more interesting than the entrees like the New York strip steak and roasted chicken. I do want to go back and try the enchiladas divorciadas ($27) of mole rojo and mole negro with vegetables.
         The specials on the menu include a whole branzino with avocado, tortillas and salsa, lemon and the smart addition of kurakake, usually made with dried fish and seaweed, which adds a further scent and taste of the ocean ($40).   Esquites is made with corn, turmeric, Parmesan cheese, and ancho chile ashes with a lemon emulsion ($12) as a side dish.
         Most of the time I look askance at the big-boned tomahawk steak, but Ixta’s is really superlative for its beefy taste, well enhanced by roasted sweet peppers, caramelized onion, sea salt and pico de gallo. The $200 price tag is high, but, weighing in at two pounds, it will readily serve four people.
         A delectable way to end off the meal is with either the fat, sugared fried bombolones with a scoop of ice cream or the rich Mexican chocolate pudding (right).
         No one leaves hungry at Ixta. In fact, you’ll likely leave with food for tomorrow, but more important, you’ll leave with a new sense of the regional variety and enticing seasoning of Mexican food of a kind you haven’t had before in this city.

Open for dinner nightly, for brunch Sat. & Sun.

By  John Mariani

CHAPTER  TEN

        There were about twenty boxes on the cart.  David took a deep breath and opened the first. A half-hour later the second, but by then he’d learned what files could be run through quickly or discarded. Indeed, most of the files were bureaucratic correspondence about rules and regulations, hierarchies and legal documents. As he had with the American files, David was basically looking for two things: Names of criminals identified as working in Vienna from 1945 to 1950 and any allusions to drug trafficking that might include selling illegal pharmaceuticals.
           By one o’clock he’d gotten through half the files and decided to work through lunch in an effort to polish off the rest by the end of the afternoon.  Katie and he had allotted a week in London to do their research, so he needed to maximize his work time, especially since the files could be vast, even if few were revealing of anything.
            Ms. Hurley came in from time to time to ask if David needed anything—A glass of water, perhaps? Fresh pencil?—but he smiled and said no and went back to work. There wasn’t much of what he was looking for in the files and he suspected that asking for many more carts would be just as unproductive. 
            He did find the names of British officers who served in Vienna during that time in various jobs, and he copied down those particularly active during the time Graham Greene would have been doing his own research for the movie’s script.  David doubted many would still be alive in 1999, especially the upper ranking officers, so his list was narrowed by choosing officers from the ranks of second lieutenant, lieutenant and captain.  A major, like Calloway in the movie, was likely to have been thirty or older in 1950, so he’d be around 80 in 1999, but he jotted down a few majors’ names too.
            After four o’clock—this was Tuesday, so the office stayed open till seven—David did find a thin file labeled CRIMINAL ACTIVITY/DRUG TRAFFICKING HS20MC-1950, which he pounced upon. But, before perusing its contents, David thought to himself that however much he was enjoying this chase it was very likely to be futile in the end. Thus far, he saw no possible links between Harry Lime and Kim Philby, who was not even working in Vienna during that period.              He rubbed his eyes, took a breath and proceeded to read over the files.  There was not much there but his interest was drawn to a fairly short list of those the British had investigated, monitored and in many cases arrested on drug trafficking charges. Unfortunately, the list was not broken out along the lines of what kinds of drugs were being sold. Some, like morphine, were highly profitable on the black market, but there was no specific reference to penicillin, which no one who was not sick would choose to take. Still, with what remained of his pencil point, David dutifully copied them all down, about forty of them, then compared them to the list he’d copied from the U.S. archives. He was delighted to see that there was a good deal of crossover, maybe fifteen names or so—those he underlined―along with many that were not.
            The crossover names included:           

Hermann Strauss. Austrian.  Deceased 10/10/1951.

Tomas Shumanov. Russian. Whereabouts unknown 3/4/1949.

Sigrid Schuster. Austrian. Deceased 7/9/48.

Lionel Townes.  British. Incarcerated 6/8/1949.

Susanna Kroner. Austrian. Deceased 12/3/1947.

Janos Szabor. Hungarian. Whereabouts unknown.

Oskar Gurning. German. Incarcerated 2/31/1946.

James Rodgers. American. Incarcerated 4/6/1947

Harold Neame. British. Whereabouts unknown.

Ingrid Spichler. Austrian. Incarcerated 12/5/1947.

Gyorgy Specankoff. Russian. Whereabouts unknown.

William Walters.  American. Incarcerated 10/5/1947.

Stephen Berwick. British. Incarcerated 4/18/1947.

Bela Czarky. Czechoslovakia. Deceased 11/6/1949.

            For no reason he could explain, certain of the new names on the British list looked more interesting than others, especially the American and British ones, which included:

Joseph Grich. American. Remanded to American Military Police.

Stephen Larrabee.  American. Deceased. 11/3/50.

Donald Haydon. British. Whereabouts unknown.

Dr. William Tuttle.  British. Incarcerated.  6/7/48.

John Snook. British. Deceased. 2/2/49.

Oberon Lewis. British. Whereabouts unknown.

Murray Lebhardt.  American.  Remanded to American Military Police.

Maurice Kirk. British.  Incarcerated 12/18/47.

Archibald Hatcher.  British. Whereabouts unknown.

            By then it was five o’clock, and David’s eyes were very tired. He stretched at his desk—no one else had disturbed him all day—and left all the files scattered, as told. He then left the room, asked where Ms. Hurley was, and met her in her office a few doors down.
            “Have a profitable day, I hope, Mr. Greco?” she asked.
           “Maybe a little headway.”
            “Will you be needing anything else today? We’re open for another ninety minutes or so.”
            “No, not today, but I’m wondering if I may ask if, in addition to the files I used to take down these lists of names”—he showed them to her—“would there be any records of more specific charges against some of them?”
            “There may well be, and I can keep hauling out more files for you tomorrow, if you like. But I think you have to go to the court records for that sort of thing.”
            “Even if they’re military records?”
            “I don’t really know,” she said, “but I can make inquiries and probably have an answer for you in a day or two.” She scribbled down her direct phone line at the office.  “Call me.”
            “That’d be wonderful,” said David. “You’ve been a real help.”
            “So you will or will not be back tomorrow?”
            “I think I’ll wait to hear from you about those court records, but thanks a lot for all your help today.”
            Jenny Hurley watched David leaving, thinking it was odd that he’d ripped through so much material in one day, when most of the people who came to do research spent days, weeks, even months poring over endless mountains of documents to find, or never find, what they were looking for. She’d pegged David as not being a scholar, certainly not a graduate student at his age, but he’d come well recommended by Professor Mundt.  She put all the files back in their proper places and locked up the reading room early, knowing no one else was coming in that day.