Atla Debuts Today With Light Mexican Fare From Enrique Olvera

The more casual, neighborhood restaurant from esteemed Mexican-food chef Enrique Olvera and his New York right hand Daniela Soto-Innes debuts Friday, offering a healthy, vegetable-skewed menu with items like flax-seed chilaquiles, kale tamales, and an egg-white omelet with zucchini. The duo wants Atla, located in Noho at 372 Lafayette Street, to be a neighborhood restaurant, not an upscale destination dining like Cosme has become. As such, many of the dishes on the all-day menu skew lighter.

“We like to eat a lot of vegetables, but with a lot of life,” Soto-Innes has said of the new restaurant.

Breakfast, served from 9 a.m. to noon, includes a mushroom quesadilla, coconut yogurt with blueberries, a kale tamale with tomato salsa, and an Instagram-friendly chia oatmeal layered with cashews, pumpkin seeds, and caramelized ginger. A tlacoyo, an oval masa-based cake, comes topped with fresh split peas for a morning meal.

After noon, the menu switches over to a lunch and dinner menu with the addition of somewhat heartier dishes. Olvera is particularly fond of the chicken caldo, a Mexican chicken soup that’s packed with more vegetables than meat. A quinoa dish with pico de gallo and mint, farro wheat with quail egg meatballs, and steak tartare are also on the menu.

The restaurant also offers an extensive non-alcoholic drink menu, including cafe con leche, a toasted sesame horchata, passionfruit juice, and tepache, a fermented drink made from pineapple peels. On the alcoholic side, Atla has micheladas, an overproof margarita, and a long list of mezcales.

It’s a restaurant intended for frequent, casual visits, Olvera has said — and an opportunity for fans of the chef, considered one of the world’s best, to dine in one of his restaurants at a more moderate price. “We wanted to create a space where people could go and just call it home,” he says. “A regular place, kind of like a living room of your apartment.” Take a look at the full menu below, and let us know what you think if you stop by.