![]() ![]() In late 2018, they opened Foxface Sandwiches and quickly gained a reputation for their unlikely fillings: camel kebabs, elk osso buco, bison heart with tahini. They had debated a restaurant “for years,” according to Lahat, and the commute - a few flights of stairs - made the idea irresistible. Their landlord at the time knew they were food obsessives and asked if they were at all interested in taking over the small space downstairs. They lived in Japan for a bit (where they ran their own wine bar) and in 2017 moved back to the East Village. As a founder, Kushnir got an equity stake that gave the couple real financial security. A brief stint followed in Minneapolis, where they worked for a company then called Walleye Trading. They were active on the earliest digital food forums - Chowhound, eGullet, Mouthfuls - but in the late ’90s, they worked at a start-up that developed automated stock-trading software in New York. Kushnir and Lahat aren’t chefs or restaurateurs by training. “If I want to just open another restaurant in New York that’s like everybody else’s, what’s the point?” ![]() “I think, for me, the perspective is what do I have to offer?” says Kushnir. (How many “coastal Italian” restaurants have opened this year?) ![]() That’s likely because the owners, Sivan Lahat and Ori Kushnir, along with their chef David Santos (who worked at places like Bouley and Per Se), are actively trying to avoid falling into a trap of sameness. Friends of the owners popped by for a glass of Hudson Valley pét-nat, and I overheard another customer tell their friend that, these days, they really aren’t eating anywhere else. Skaters, aging punks, and college kids pass by the storefront’s windows while, on the night I was there, “ I Fucked Yr Mom,” by the band Sorry Mom, played on the speakers inside. This dish is served at Foxface Natural, a two-month-old restaurant near the upper boundary of Avenue A. But the peas and mint lighten it, and it becomes something else entirely. As the broth mixes with the sausage, it becomes rich and bloody, which may make you think of nam tok, the blood-enriched Thai soup. Inside, the pasta is plump with clove-and-cinnamon-spiced blood sausage. A single long raviolo, called girella - saw-toothed and coiled like a snake - is surrounded by a wreath of pea shoots, some peas, and a tableside bath of mint-peapod broth. In the East Village, there’s a pasta unlike any other. ![]()
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