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Alex Ureña has been working in New York kitchens almost since he arrived from the Dominican Republic at age 15. He started out washing dishes at the River Café before graduating to pastry and garde-manger, spent nine years with David Bouley, opened Blue Hill with Dan Barber, and became executive chef at Marseille and Suba. Between gigs, he ricocheted around France and Spain, soaking up experience from masters like Roger Vergé and Ferran Adrià. Stimulated by Spain’s gastronomic revolution and its pervasive effect on the culinary avant-garde, Ureña officially joins their ranks with his modern Spanish restaurant, the kind of place that assumes a certain foodie familiarity with phrases like mustard paper and chorizo emulsion. Like-minded pastry chef Caryn Stabinsky, a WD-50 alum, bakes her own bread and takes a playful approach to dessert—one of them, called "Breakfast" involves wheat toast cake, Bulgarian feta, maple caramel, and rosemary oil. — Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld