Zagat Editor James Mulcahy stopped by Empellon Cocina in the East Village to learn about how they are modernizing Mexican cuisine. Here is what Chef/Owner Alex Stupak had to say about his new eatery:

"The concept here is that a Mexican restaurant can exist without tacos," says Stupak. "The menu strives to find a balance between traditional and non-traditional, and sometimes it's hard to tell which ones are which, which I actually enjoy about the menu.

"One of the dishes that I'm really proud of right now, it's a dry-aged New York strip steak, but the thing that's unique about it is that it's served cold. We shave it pretty thin, but not carpaccio-thin, so you still feel like you're eating a piece of steak. We apply a lot of different that are pretty much ubiquitous with carne asada, you have crema, queso fresco, a good red chili sauce, a black bean component. You still feel like you're eating carne asada but it's completely reversed. It's a cold dish, it's an appetizer.

"It's a casual restaurant, we still want you to be able to walk in off the street and maybe even just have a cocktail and a quick bite at the bar. It was important to me, the look of the place, that you knew you were in a Mexican restaurant, but we didn't try to force it's ethnicity upon you. We tried to keep it very much with a blue focus. We have some beautiful Sylvia Ji paintings that we had commissioned for the restaurant, a white banquette and that casual dining room is sort of dichotomized by a very serious, brightly-lit, intense kitchen.

"Our kitchen window, to try temper the light or the brightness of the kitchen, we actually utilized it as a place to list all our different salsas that we have on the menu and all of the ingredients that go into them. We think it's just a fun thing to do to show the complexity of Mexican cooking.

"We wanted to see if we could take Mexican cooking a step further. We believe, like any other great cuisine, it deserves to be beautiful, it deserves to composed and it deserves to be studied," concludes Stupak.

For more information on Empellon Cocina and other new restaurants, visit blog.zagat.com.