One of the Defining Restaurants of Its Generation Just Announced It’s Closing

It’s almost a miracle that Blanca existed in the first place, but unfortunately there’s no miracle that could save the acclaimed Brooklyn chef’s counter restaurant tucked behind a pizzeria.

Founding chef Carlo Mirarchi told The New York Times that the restaurant’s landlord has decided to terminate the lease. The location—which had two Michelin stars at its height—will serve its last dinner on April 12.

Blanca was born in 2012 as the fine-dining offshoot of the influential and popular Roberta’s in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Musicians Brandon Hoy and Chris Parachini founded that restaurant; the duo then ran out of money while building a restaurant on a blighted Brooklyn block. Mirarchi came into the picture as chef and also provided $30,000 to help get Roberta’s finished. He became a partner and the driving culinary force.

Unlike other chefs who’ve reached his Michelin two-star heights, Mirarchi didn’t stage (work unpaid internships) in high-end kitchens across Europe to hone his craft. Inside Roberta’s, he harnessed his obsessive streak to improve his own cooking. He found himself searching for and focusing on individual ingredients to build his dishes, much like the best of Italian cooking. That could mean aging his own meat at the restaurant or even growing his own produce. And from his cooks, he encouraged creativity, uncommon in the old-school French brigade kitchens they had previously worked in. The food and atmosphere had people from across the city willing to venture to a desolate stretch of Bushwick.

Mirarchi’s ambition grew. One night, the chef behind Manresa, David Kinch, came in to eat. The two had become friends after meeting at an event, and Kinch just told Mirarchi to cook some stuff for him. Kinch enjoyed the meal enough that he told Manresa regulars that lived in New York to dine there, and Mirarchi started serving a tasting menu one night a week at one table. It gave the Roberta’s team the confidence to open a 12-seat tasting-menu-only chef’s counter in an unused space inside their culinary compound. There, Mirarchi could really flex his culinary muscle, and Michelin eventually awarded the spot two stars.

The two restaurants combined—Roberta’s and Blanca—caught the wave of the Brooklyn craft movement, where the borough became a cultural force around the world. Artisans across Brooklyn were making their own bean-to-bar chocolate, canning pickles, opening old-timey butcher shops, and forging knives. And people from L.A. to Paris began emulating the region’s DIY ethos and aesthetics.

“I worked as a chef in Williamsburg from 2010 to 2014, and Roberta’s was the epitome of cool,” chef Andy Doubrava of Nashville’s tasting-counter restaurant Catbird Seat told us in 2019 when discussing the restaurants that defined 2010s dining. “He had his pizzeria and then his Michelin-starred place, and that’s what every chef wanted. We all talked about it. We all went there together to eat. The servers were, like, kind of douche-y but in a cool way where you wanted to be friends with them. Everything about it was perfect.”

While Roberta’s operated during the pandemic, Covid-19 shuttered Blanca for a time until Victoria Blamey revived it a little bit more than a year ago. The reborn Blanca won the acclaim of critics in New York—including being named No. 2 on Pete Wells’s The New York Times ranking of the top 100 restaurants in the city. The closure of Blanca is a setback for Blamey, whose previous stints included following Alfred Portale at Gotham Bar & Grill, which closed in early 2020, and her own restaurant acclaimed restaurant, Mena, that folded in less than six months.

This time around she’s enduring a closure because the realities of today’s New York real estate market don’t match the one Blanca was born into. Blanca helped elevate a scruffy neighborhood to the point where the land it sits on is almost too valuable to support an independent, experimental restaurant. It’s a story oft repeated with restaurants across New York City neighborhoods, and now it comes time for Blanca to depart Bushwick as the landlord looks for tenants whom it can charge a higher rent.