Restaurant Review: Caribbean Staples Made “Healthy as a Motha”

HAAM’s chef-owner, Yesenia Ramdass, grew up in a Dominican American family and got into veganism as a teen.

The restaurant keeps slightly bizarre hours, opening at 1 P.M. during the week, a little late for the lunch crowd, and closing most nights at nine. When I dropped in recently for an afternoon meal, a server suggested that I try the Chimichurri Chunk Steak. At twenty-nine dollars, it’s the most expensive dish on the very reasonably priced menu, and is made with a soy-and-wheat-based faux beef from a brand called, inelegantly, Chunk Foods. The dish that arrived so eerily resembled an actual beef filet—seared until crusty outside, tender pink and juicy within—that I did a double take. Served alongside fried plantains, rice, and a bowl of soupy, savory black beans, it was marvellous and uncanny, especially under a drizzle of Ramdass’s ultra-garlicky chimichurri.

A plant-based steak looks just like an actual beef fillet, crusty on the outside and tender pink within.

Ramdass first did HAAM as a pop-up, in 2020, and eventually landed a stand at Smorgasburg. Social-media-friendly snacks from the business’s earlier incarnation are still available, such as a gorgeous mess of barbecue-sauced faux meat with tamarind chutney, cabbage slaw, and dairy-free queso piled onto a fried plantain split lengthwise, like a savory banana split. But the stability and patience of a dine-in crowd gives Ramdass an opportunity to explore flavors and presentations that are a little bit more grown-up and refined. That mofongo, studded with bits of smoky tempeh, is served atop a pool of pale coconut-cream sauce perfumed with curry. The tender yucca fries that come alongside a jerk-mushroom patacón (a Dominican sandwich made with fried plantains in lieu of bread) are plated with geometric precision. A ceviche appetizer is made with hearts of palm, whose brisk salinity and bouncy texture serve as a clever dupe for fish or shrimp. Mixed with a colorful confetti of fresh vegetables, it is plated on rounds of tostones and topped with a toothpick bearing a HAAM-branded paper flag, as if it had been claimed by a tiny, intrepid explorer. The dish is lime-bright, salty, and bracingly alive, especially if you add a few dashes of the fiery house-made Hot as a Motha sauce, made from peppers grown by Ramdass’s father-in-law. It’s a joy to eat—and, I suppose, it’s healthy, by some definitions, if you care about that sort of thing. ♦