How Cosme Created Its Most Iconic Dish

That’s 86,400 ducks that have been aged, braised, deboned, and turned into carnitas over the years, according to Olvera’s math. In reality, it’s probably much higher: Ever since Cosme started making duck carnitas, other chefs haven’t been able to help themselves from doing the same, either.

Cosme, which turned 10 years old in October, is one of the decade’s most influential restaurants. It opened in tandem with other restaurants that were taking a fine-dining approach to Mexican cuisine that hadn’t yet been seen in New York. It was a good time to take risks, Olvera says, like importing corn from Mexico to make tortillas and selling tacos that cost as much as porterhouse steaks.

One of those risks — making carnitas with duck instead of pork — became the restaurant’s signature dish.

If you haven’t tried Cosme’s carnitas yourself, you probably know someone who has. The dish, a deboned half-duck, is served in a cast-iron skillet with a stack of warm tortillas on the side. When Cosme first opened, there was nothing quite like it. A decade later, there still really isn’t.

The idea for the dish came from Cosme’s former chef de cuisine, Daniela Soto-Innes. According to Olvera, he and Soto-Innes wanted to serve carnitas, but they couldn’t find the right pork supplier. When Soto-Innes suggested using duck, and riffing on a recipe from her mother, he was intrigued.

The carnitas take almost four days to prepare, and nearly every cook at Cosme has done their time making them. Chefs start by stringing up ducks in a walk-in refrigerator that can fit 64 birds at once. Over time, the low temperatures dry out the meat, making the skin easier to crisp in the oven.

They’re ready to cook after three days. The ducks sizzle under a broiler before being dunked in a bath of duck fat, onion, tomato, orange, and Mexican Coca-Cola. Soto-Innes added condensed milk for sweetness and evaporated milk to tenderize the meat.

The carnitas simmer all night. In the morning, the first cooks to arrive debone and portion the meat. Each order of carnitas consists of half of a duck. The breasts are served, intact, with a mound of cilantro, onion, and radish. After curing and cooking for almost 100 hours, the meat falls right apart, perfect for placing into one of Cosme’s freshly made tortillas.

From the start, the duck was one of Cosme’s best sellers, although Olvera admits he “never thought it would catch on.” It was the first time most people had paid $59 for what was essentially an order of tacos, and anyway, “Normally, people aren’t crazy about duck,” he says.

This time, they were.

Since Cosme opened, duck carnitas have shown up on restaurant menus across the country. And while Soto-Innes wasn’t the first to make them, her version has become the one to beat. It’s one reason customers continue to pay $112 — the current price — to try them.

“We were trying to do something that would belong in New York, but with a Mexican technique,” he says.

The timing for a dish like that couldn’t have been better. Over a decade earlier, Olvera opened his flagship restaurant, Pujol, in Mexico City. Given that many of his customers were American, he thought they might be open to a more modern interpretation of Mexican cuisine in the United States.

He wasn’t alone. The same year that Cosme opened in Manhattan, Casa Enrique became the first Mexican restaurant in New York to receive a Michelin star. A few years later, two other Mexican fine dining restaurants — Claro and Oxomoco — were awarded stars, too.

Mexican food, once thought of as “stereotypical and one-dimensional,” was becoming more modern and specialized in New York, Olvera says.

Luis Herrera, the chef at Ensenada in Brooklyn, was part of the restaurant’s opening team. “My entire life was Cosme,” he says. And at that time, that meant his entire life was duck carnitas.

He recalls early mornings and late nights spent at the restaurant. Everything revolved around the 64 duck carcasses hanging in the walk-in refrigerator. “I can close my eyes and make that recipe from memory,” he says.

There were many times when the dish cooperated. Like the time that Pete Wells, the former food critic at the New York Times, tried it. He called the carnitas “sensational” in a defining, three-star review.

Other times, one of the many steps went awry: the meat burned while simmering overnight or the walk-in refrigerator lost power, spoiling days’ worth of duck. “It was a 24/7 process,” Herrera says.

The complicated process hasn’t deterred the chef Tae Woo Lee. Lee and his partner, Jake Geragos, sell duck carnitas at their Manhattan restaurant, Dirty Taco. They use leg meat, instead of duck breast, and sell their tacos for a fraction of the price: about $7 each. Otherwise, the preparation is spot on.

“It’s an incredible dish,” Lee says, “but not everyone can spend $100. We want to make it cheap so that people can try it.”

Olvera sees the many imitators as a good thing. “It’s flattering that people like what you do and think it’s something they can replicate,” he says. “It’s a bad thing if nobody wants to.”

And while the menu at Cosme has evolved since 2014, and the price of the carnitas has more than doubled, the dish hasn’t really changed. It still takes three days to make, and an entire staff working around the clock.

“It’s one of the most popular dishes on the menu for a reason,” Olvera says.

Cosme is open daily for dinner starting at 5 p.m.

Luke Fortney is a journalist who covers food, culture, and trends. Follow him on Instagram. Follow Resy, too.