Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/648009
5 6 | t h e c l e v e r r o o t Chef Serena Bass of Lido. Warm grilled organic kale salad, can- nellini beans, rosemary, shaved parme- san, 30-year-aged sherry vinaigrette. Owners, Leticia Skai Young and her chef husband, Raymond Zamanta Mohan of Lolo's Seafood Shack. Clockwise from top: Crawfish in LoLo's coconut curry-based sauce with garlic, ginger, scallion and Old Bay; homemade Johnny cakes flecked with scallion and thyme, and brushed with house-made honey butter; Wok-seared cauliflower with garlic creme and herbs; "Durty rice" made with coconut milk, house- made sofrito, black-eyed peas and kidney beans; Peel and eat shrimp with ginger scallion sauce. LOLO'S SEAFOOD SHACK Across the street from Streetbird, LoLo's Seafood Shack is adrift in Caribbean-inspired charm, helped by its own- ers, Leticia Skai Young and her chef husband, Raymond Zamanta Mohan. Young, a native New Yorker born of a Belize father, grew up shredding fresh coconut at her aunt's home. Chef Mohan hails from British Guyana, where he grew up in his mother's market stand. They met while working at Colors, one of the city's first cooperative restaurant incubators, but Young says, "We always thought we'd do something together." Last year they made it a reality—in a former Chinese take-out place now transformed into a hodgepodge of color and texture, where Cape Cod comfort food meets Caribbean street eats. In the islands, the lolo is a small traditional restaurant where people meet and eat. "We didn't [initially] have this concept but we developed it around the kitchen, space and neighborhood," says Young. Chef Mohan made use of the woks left behind. Mohan says LoLo's represents a collective takeaway from his previous stints such as Jean-Georges, David Burke and Douglas Rodriguez's Nuevo Latino restaurants, Patria and Chicama. "Jean-Georges was a strict brigade system. The cuisine was not muddled: What I learned there is to extract the essence from ingredients," says Mohan. David Burke, he noted, was whimsy and presentation. But with Rodriguez, he expanded his cultural influences. "We would fly the best ingredients from all over the world and have them within 24 hours or sooner—amaz- ing fish and sea urchins . . . still breathing," he recalled. That immediacy, coupled with his upbringing in a market, informs his cooking at LoLo's. Mohan, who is also a yogi, rides his bike some 100 blocks south to the greenmarket for shopping, where arrives with a clean slate and roams the market for inspiration. "You're driven by the product, not by what you want to do," he says, noting that whatever he choses, he will likely fold in some of the diverse cultures in which he grew up—"French-obsessed ancestors from India, Dutch and Portuguese." Mashup is the order of the day here, but Mohan says, no matter the mix, "ingredients and their harmony are intuitive to me." LoLo's Seafood Shack, 303 W 116th St.