With restaurant concept Hera, chef Jay Rodriguez has started working from home.
Three years after it began taking over New York City apartments, Hera is settling down. Well, sort of.
If you’re looking for an address for Hera, you aren’t going to find it on Google Maps. You can find a website and Instagram page for the restaurant, both boasting photos of beautiful small plates and sceney, candle-lit dining rooms, yet no address. But Hera’s elusivity is not exclusivity or some technological glitch, it’s because the closest thing Hera has to a storefront is chef Jay Rodriguez’s own apartment.
Founded by Rodriguez in February 2021, the self-described ‘roaming restaurant’ Hera was born during a particularly tough time to be a restaurant. Bypassing the reticence many had to return to public spaces, Hera invited guests to dine in other people’s apartments, the locations of which Rodriguez sourced through friends of friends.
New York City apartments aren’t necessarily designed for gourmet cooking, and hosting in someone else’s home presents its own problems: the back burner is out, the gas is shut off for these hours today, you have to be out by 11:00 p.m. because my boyfriend needs to wake up early tomorrow. But through word of mouth, the apartment dinners began selling out and opportunities to host at other restaurants started popping up. After having just celebrated the restaurant’s three-year anniversary in February, Hera is starting to settle down.
“It’s definitely interesting being a chef who works from home,” Rodriguez explains, as the monthly apartment dinners have found a home at his place off the Gates Avenue J station. His whole life is overtaken with pieces of Hera — a camera roll full of pictures of produce at the Union Square Farmers Market he’s brainstorming recipes for, a fridge stuffed with seasonal vegetables, and a freezer brimming with bright green leek oil.
This leek oil is emblematic of the food philosophy of Hera as Rodriguez explains it: “We cook vegetables the same way we cook animals — nose to tail.”
Though not specifically vegetarian, vegetables are what Hera specializes in. While most of us would discard the tough leaves at the top of a leek, Rodriguez turns them into a bright green, fragrant, and oniony oil that can be used in any dressing or sauce. Take Hera’s not-quite-signature signature dish of smoked olives, which are marinated in it.
The rest of the leek gets used too, of course, but every piece of a vegetable is treated differently. For example, the skins of carrots — which have a more minerally and earthy flavor than the sweeter body — get turned into carrot salt. Anything left over, the kitchen will try to pickle, preserve, or jamify — at least however much will fit in Rodriguez’s fridge.
Right now, it’s a fun time to be in the kitchen, Rodriguez explains. His typical Saturday morning is spent at the Union Square Farmers Market, and in the next few weeks, we’ll finally bid farewell to root vegetables and start seeing peas, rhubarb, and the first few signs of green.
Being at the market is about opening up a line of dialogue with the farmers too. For most of us, any tomato will do when we need one, but Rodriguez is there asking if they’re going to be extra savory this year or not and designing his dishes around that. The goal is to let the produce and the farmers behind it shine.
“Everyone I work with, we can make stuff into spheres and cones and smoke and gelatins,” Rodriguez explains about some of the bells and whistles of gourmet cooking. “But that’s not what we do because it’s not what I want to eat, and I will never cook something for anyone that I’m not eating myself.”
That’s another thing about Hera: it’s fine dining, but it’s not trying to be exclusive even if it’s hard to find. The five-course tasting menu is $75, with an optional wine pairing that ranges from $45–50. It’s no cheap date, but the five-course menu at the similarly vegetable-heavy Dirt Candy in the Lower East Side is $105 with an optional $55 wine pairing — and that’s still a decent deal in the world of Michelin stars. If you’re so inclined, you could travel uptown to spend $285 on Eleven Madison Park’s six-course vegan tasting menu, drinks not included.
Hera’s food doesn’t want to be locked behind impossible-to-get reservations or the often-stuffy atmosphere of a fine dining establishment. When events are finished, the restaurant tries to pack up whatever they can and leave it in community fridges in the area.
“I think restaurants owe it to themselves and owe it to their communities to feed them in a literal sense but also in a communal sense,” Rodriguez says. “Whenever we can, we want to highlight people over products.”
This ethos carries over to his team as well. Toussaint Stackhouse, the sommelier with Hera, tries to move guests beyond the familiar world of French or Italian wines to the less traveled territory of Hungarian, Croatian, or Moravian wines. “It gives people the courage to explore these places on their own,” Stackhouse says, something important in a space like wine culture, which can be daunting to an outsider.
Educator is an important — but sometimes overlooked — role the staff of a restaurant play. Hera’s pastry chef Ryan Del Franco says the format of Hera makes this aspect of the job easier. Since there’s no kitchen door between your food and who made it, you can actually talk to your chefs. “Our best guests ask so many questions, and between the three of us, we’ll talk their ear off about whatever they want to hear,” Del Franco explains.
Between long talks with guests about buckwheat or sustainability, Hera’s made time this month for a restaurant takeover in Greenpoint, a private event it’s hosting in Westchester, and its apartment dinners. Later this spring, the restaurant will travel across the Atlantic for a two-week take-over of a wine bar in Brussels. Even so, the unconventionality of this all is still cause for question for some.
“I get asked three years later by people who’ve just met me or just heard about Hera if I’ve ever even worked in a restaurant,” says Rodriguez. He was practically born in them, as his parents owned a catering company he often helped out with. His resume boasts places like Oxalis and Due West. If you still don’t believe it, why not try the food?
At any rate, these few and far-between cases of skepticism don’t scare the restaurant away from anything. Rodriguez is hoping to settle Hera into a true brick-and-mortar restaurant, hopefully in Brooklyn, in the next year. While this has always been the goal, after hosting nearly 200 people for Hera’s third birthday dinner, Rodriguez and Del Franco agreed that Hera had gotten a little bigger than what an apartment kitchen could handle.
Even when the restaurant makes that transition, Rodriguez aims to harken back to Hera’s origins. This could take on many forms. It might be having his pastry chef turn the place into a bakery for a day. It might be having his sommelier host a wine school one night. It might be hosting apartment dinners back at Rodriguez’s place to sample a new menu before it debuts in the restaurant.
It’s unconventional, for sure, but it doesn’t daunt Rodriguez. “We’ve spent three years turning spaces that aren’t restaurants into restaurants and treating them as such. What if when we have the restaurant, we can use it and turn it into stuff that it’s not?”
