If you’re going to eat a pastel de nata, you’d better eat it warm. That’s what Joey Batista, or Bats for short, will tell you at his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cafe on the Lower East Side. He may also tell you that a pastel de nata is the love child of a crème brûlée and a croissant. The description sounds salacious, but it’s accurate.
These flaky, buttery tarts filled with sweet custard are definitively Portuguese. They bear little resemblance to the Hong Kong- and Macanese-style egg tarts sold in nearby Chinatown, which are most likely descendants of the English shortcrust and custard.
At Joey Bats Café, Mr. Batista buries the mottled surface of each pastel — the result of a supremely hot oven — under a windfall of cinnamon and powdered sugar. “I don’t even ask if you want it,” he said. “I just put it on. Like they do in Lisbon.” The fine layers of pastry crunch in all the right places as the soft, vanilla-spiked custard spills into your mouth with each bite.
Joey Bats Café on the Lower East Side specializes in Portuguese flaky custard tarts called pastéis de nata.CreditColin Clark for The New York Times
Mr. Batista, 39, the son of Portuguese immigrants, started selling pastéis de nata at street fairs around New York in 2016. The recipe was developed by his mother, Isabel Fernandes, a formidable home cook who made desserts for her brother’s restaurant in their hometown, Ludlow, Mass., before heading the kitchen at her son’s cafe.
“Mom is the food, and I am the business,” Mr. Batista said.
When demand surpassed his weekend supply, Mr. Batista quit his day job in sales to devote himself to pastéis full time. The Lower East Side store opened in July, followed by a second location in Ludlow, which his youngest sister manages. Their mother stocks both with a variety of her home-style sweets and savories.
Once you’ve tried the pastel, because you must try the pastel, there is bolo de bolacha. The Portuguese equivalent of tiramisù, it’s a kind of nostalgic icebox cake that layers coffee-dipped tea biscuits with velvety buttercream. After resting in the refrigerator overnight, the biscuits turn into spongy discs on the verge of dissolving into all that luscious cream.
The cafe blurs the line between a bakery and a traditional Portuguese tasca, where petiscos, or snacks, are served. Rissóis de camarão are parcels of deep-fried dough filled with baby shrimp bathed in béchamel. Better yet are the bolinhos de bacalhau, which transform salt cod, potatoes and parsley into rugged-shelled fritters of salt and sea. Ms. Fernandes has perfected her version of this humble finger food.
When you’ve exhausted the options on the short menu, it’s worth asking if there are any other treats in the back, as Ms. Fernandes is often experimenting with something new. On one of my visits, she offered a dense slab of chilled pudim flan, dripping with sticky caramel. Carving out a bite is like running a spoon through room-temperature butter. Eating it is satisfying, even if it is achingly sweet.
Or there may be a stash of pão com chouriço, a homemade roll with a trove of sautéed onions and wine-steeped Portuguese sausage that, when baked, melts pork fat into the bread. The lusty combination of salt, fat and prickly paprika has yet to make it onto the menu, mostly because Mr. Batista is still working on a clever name.
Mr. Batista, who has a background in information technology, is also striving for a larger scale. It’s why he decided to hire a company in Massachusetts to bake and flash-freeze the pastéis de nata. After 10 minutes in the oven, they are ready to serve. “It’s not crazy to think that one day, this could be like buying cookie dough in a supermarket.”
He sells the heat-and-eat pastries at the cafe, ships them in the United States and Canada and sees a cafe franchise in his future. In the meantime, he is focused on expanding the menu at his existing locations. The shrimp fritters will soon be available with chicken and beef fillings. And Ms. Fernandes is working on versions of her pão com chouriço, which currently sells for $10.
“If it was up to my mom,” Mr. Batista said, “she’d give everything away for free.”
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