Marathi Restaurant
Posted by estiator at 10 February, at 08 : 59 AM Print
RESTAURANT SPOTLIGHT
Marathi 200 Church St., New York, NY 10013
By MICHAEL KAMINER
Closing a restaurant can mean the end of an era. But for Andreas Koutsoudakis, shuttering Tribeca’s Kitchen in New York City is the start of a whole new chapter. With a star culinary team, Koutsoudakis has transformed Tribeca’s Kitchen into Marathi (marathinyc. com), a warm and welcoming bistro featuring “regionally inspired dishes from the shores of Crete.”
Koutsoudakis’ father, local legend Andy Koutsoudakis Sr., opened Tribeca’s Kitchen in 1989. Though Tribeca’s Kitchen had been part of Koutsoudakis’ family for decades, Marathi is no less personal, he tells Estiator. For one thing, the Koutsoudakis clan used to spend summers on Marathi beach in Crete. For another, “I realized I couldn’t add new pages to the Tribeca’s Kitchen story—my dad wrote that,” says Koutsoudakis, who is also a lawyer and entrepreneur. “With Marathi, I’m writing the next chapter of a new book.”
Koutsoudakis’ vision includes a Cretan-inspired menu “that doesn’t exist anywhere else in New York,” Koutsoudakis says. Along with chef Nicholas Poulmentis, a Chopped champion who grew up on Kythira, Koutsoudakis is reinventing tradition with eye-popping, tongueteasing dishes like Greek sushi made with grape leaves, taramosalata with black-truffle powder, and Cretan-style snails. “Even if you hate snails, they’re delicious,” Koutsoudakis jokes.
A chicken-lemon ramen reimagines avgolemono—complete with traditional fide noodles—with a “harissa bomb” of delicious intensity. A trio of “pita tacos” boasts ribeye, chicken with yogurt sauce, and pastrami with salsa verde. Octopus comes with a surprise pairing of black-eyed peas.
Traditional foods get their spotlight, too. Kontosouvli translates as a Flintstones-sized pork chop with traditional Cretan seasoning. Tuna is “simply grilled” and served with sea beans. Among the sweets: ice cream mastiha and rose-gold chocolate rice pudding.
Marathi serves breakfast and brunch, too, reinventing a Tribeca’s Kitchen tradition. “Through the year, as I spoke to customers, I learned that my father would make them stuff off-menu, usually inspired by things he’d eat in Greece,” Koutsoudakis says. “So at Marathi, we make Eggs-Up Americanaki. Americanaki is what they’d call kids when we’d return to Crete. We use Greek bread instead of challah for our French toast. Our Greek link sausages are made in-house.”
After Tribeca’s Kitchen closed in October, Marathi opened a week later in a kind of beta-testing phase. “Nick, our chef, has taught me that you can’t put everything out there right away. You have to get customers to know you and trust you. You share some things that are familiar and some that are new. Once you build a following, you can start introducing more.” The strategy has paid off handsomely. “Customers have been blown away,” he said.
The wine list includes a well-edited selection of Greek wines; cocktails all take their names from Cretan sayings, like the Aspro Pato (“bottoms up!”), with tsikoudia, passion fruit, avocado pitorgeat, lime and egg white. “We’re trying to give people an experience that’s not typical Greek taverna,” Koutsoudakis says. “This is not another fish-onice-with-an-expensive-contractor restaurant.”
The airy, reconfigured dining room now beckons with whites and neutrals. Kitchen equipment was overhauled or upgraded. “The venue itself has a new look, and a new lease on life,” Koutsoudakis says. Marathi can also host events—a new line of revenue for the space. “We did a wedding at this venue, full closure, 140 people. We were never able to do that. We have 80 people booked for a brunch in July. You make these changes, hope to introduce something new, and explore new revenue streams.”
With the opening, Koutsoudakis himself has come full circle, he says. “When my dad passed, I said, ‘How do I fix it?’ Aside from personal reasons of keeping his memory alive, what does the future look like for this business? How do I make sure it survives long-term?”
The time had come, he realized, “to have my own identity. A new logo wasn’t enough. People would forever be saying ‘prices are high’ or ‘you’re missing this or that dish.’”
Estiator readers may recall that Koutsoudakis Sr. passed away of complications from Covid-19 on March 27, 2020. A beloved figure in downtown Manhattan, he was only 59. At the time, Andreas Jr. generated worldwide headlines by launching a GoFundMe campaign in his father’s memory to provide masks for essential workers. “I talked to my father four, five times a day. There was rarely a father [and] son that was so close,” he told The New York Post at the time.
“I was trying to keep Tribeca’s Kitchen alive as a grieving mechanism. But my dad is not here,” he tells Estiator. “The business has to come first, and my dad always told me that. I had to go through the last year and a half, or I wouldn’t have landed here. Marathi is what I’m supposed to do now.”
