There are bodega cats, there are bookstore cats, and then there’s Sabrina the restaurant jaguar.
Sabrina is the life-size faux (not taxidermied) feline perched atop a tree branch like the Cheshire Cat at the back of Hellbender restaurant in Ridgewood, Queens. She’s an apt spirit animal for this protean establishment and its chef, Yara Herrera.
Jaguars, in Mayan mythology, have the supernatural ability to go where they like, lords of the underworld who move lithely between light and dark, life and death, and in Sabrina’s case, brunch and last call.
It’s been open only 14 months, but Hellbender has already undergone all sorts of transitions. Ms. Herrera, who trained under Wolfgang Puck and David Chang, and her partners, who co-own the nearby restaurant Rolo’s, established Hellbender first as a lighthearted cocktail bar serving Mexican-inspired snacks. The food menu was cursory but compelling — fried Oaxacan cheese sticks and shrimp cocktail with Clamato, to accompany Hennessy piña coladas and Tajín-spiked strawberry margaritas shaken well into the wee hours.
When the partners noticed that food was outselling drinks, they expanded the dinner menu to showcase more of Ms. Herrera’s modern Mexican American cooking, which she had honed during the pandemic at Xilonen and various pop-ups. Last month, they added weekend brunch, a lure for both families with small children and night owls looking for a hair-of-the-dog michelada.
A cocktail bar metamorphosing into a very good restaurant is as likely as a salamander turning into a butterfly. (A hellbender, by the way, is a large North American salamander named for its diabolical looks.) But with Ms. Herrera’s adept, soulful cooking, Hellbender makes it seem like a natural evolution.
Everything from Ms. Herrera’s kitchen is a notch or two more precise and creative than you’d expect from a neighborhood night spot with unfussy wooden booths, exposed brick walls and an exuberant playlist of reggaeton, bachata and mariachi. But like Sabrina, whom the chef named after her best friend, Ms. Herrera seems to move smoothly between worlds. And her background in fine dining has helped create what otherwise could seem like a hipster Margaritaville.
This starts with the ingredients. Most of the produce comes from local farms, including rosy leaves of Castelfranco radicchio covered with a feathery layer of Cotija cheese, as well as watercress frills and roasted beets in the marinated heirloom Ayocote bean salad that’s tossed, beguilingly, in an intense, housemade salsa macha.
Hellbender gets its tortillas from Sobre Masa in nearby Bushwick, Brooklyn, which nixtamalizes and grinds native varieties of Mexican corn on site. These pliable, earthy rounds are the foundation of Ms. Herrera’s excellent roster of tacos. My favorite so far, topped with crisp-edged oyster mushrooms and seasoned with sesame and lime, had the texture and brawniness of shredded meat yet turned out to be vegan.
Very nearly as good were the fried-shrimp tacos, smothered in shredded cabbage and creamy serrano-chile tartar sauce. Even the ethereal masa pancakes make use of Sobre Masa’s flour. Crisp at the edges, fluffy in the center and crowned with a puck of cold butter and a sprinkle of cinnamon, they’re an inspired standout on the appealing brunch menu.
It’s at weekend dinner service, though, and particularly in the specials, that Ms. Herrera’s skill and culinary imagination shine brightest. On a recent Saturday night, a plate of plump Savage Blonde oysters from Prince Edward Island shimmered demurely in a sweet and spicy green apple-yuzu kosho mignonette.
On subsequent visits, I witnessed another raw fish dish, the bracing aguachile, go through several stunning costume changes. One night, kanpachi glowed orange in a guajillo-imbued carrot juice speckled with peanuts; another time, hamachi was robed in house-pickled green chiles and cucumbers. Ms. Herrera worked for five years at a sushi restaurant in her native Los Angeles, and it shows in her assured technique with all things oceanic.
Still, meat is the star in one of the best dishes on the Hellbender menu, the al pastor pork ribs. This recipe is a collaboration with the kitchen at Rolo’s, where the chefs Howard Kalachnikoff and Rafiq Salim have perfected pork ribs with wobbly, meltingly tender meat in a thin layer of chicharron-crisp fat. Ms. Herrera takes it a step further, slicking that pork in a mix of guajillo chile, fresh pineapple, confit garlic and cumin before adding a contrapuntal heap of sweet raw onions.
Ms. Herrera’s playfulness and drive make even the simplest dishes remarkable. She riffs on the classic Mexican snack of fresh fruit topped with salt, lime juice and chamoy — a sauce made from pickled fruit and spices that normally comes in a jar — in her chamoy apple appetizer. But instead of using the store-bought sauce she grew up with, Ms. Herrera decided to make her own from scratch, playing with different combinations of dried apricots, hibiscus, orange juice and chile de árbol until she arrived at a tangy-sweet, scarlet elixir that plays perfectly with slices of crisp, juicy apple (or mango, Asian pear, or watermelon, depending on what’s in season). I ordered it every time I visited, and had to vie with my tablemates to scoop up the last drop of puckery sauce. (Pro-tip: Use the leftover totopos that came with the rich and chunky guacamole.)
If you’re averse to loud music, the gradually rising volume of corridos and hip-hop classics could have you gesturing for the check, but restrain the urge until you’ve had dessert. The sumptuous “jello” of the day, made from scratch in flavors like fresh coconut-lime, bruléed banana and orange creamsicle, is well worth a little shouting.
But if the bouncing energy of the place is your thing, settle in and make a night of it. Hellbender’s superb cocktail lineup, like the food menu, combines deep historical knowledge with a flair for experimentation. And that playlist is hard to beat.
Hellbender isn’t an easy place to pigeonhole. Is it still a bustling bar with exceptionally good food, or is it an exceptional restaurant with late-night vibes? As the grinning cat presiding over the dining room seems to say, slinking between the two is exactly the point.
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