the dish

How Narcissa Makes a Sweet Potato Taste Like Bacon

“The first time I smoked a Murasaki sweet potato, I knew I wanted to make a dish around it,” says Narcissa chef de cuisine Max Blachman-Gentile, who recently overhauled the restaurant’s menu in collaboration with Angela Dimayuga, the Standard hotel group’s new creative director of food and culture. After a hickory-chip–suffused hour, “it takes on an almost vegetarian-bacon flavor,” he says. That’s just one element of a recipe that juxtaposes the red-skinned Murasaki with another Japanese strain, the Okinawan; both are boiled, smoked, smashed, and deep-fried, then draped in two Peruvian-inspired sauces and garnished with pickled peppers. And thanks to a final flourish of toasted poppy seeds, there’s also what the chef describes as “a bagel-and-cream-cheese thing going on.”

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On the menu at Narcissa; $15; 25 Cooper Sq., at 5th St.; 212-228-3344.

*This article appears in the December 10, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

How Narcissa Makes a Sweet Potato Taste Like Bacon