One Great Plate: Pickled Ginger Scallops with Candied Red Chili

“Graffiti” is an evocative word. When a friend recommended that I try a wine bar in the East Village by that name, I pictured lots of neon, a stellar Italian beer selection and spike-haired young Europhiles with cigarettes drooping from their lips.

Taking a reluctant step inside Jehangir Mehta’s shoebox of a restaurant, I was pleasantly surprised.

Graffiti is a simple operation. The dining room is the size of a walk-in closet, with a galley kitchen in the back and a four-person staff that pulls double duty as both cooks and servers. Graffiti dispenses with a traditional menu structure and divides its dishes by price: $7, $12 and $15 (the wine list uses a similarly pared-down approach, with bottles at $25 and glasses at $8).

For all the concept’s simplicity, Mehta’s cooking was wonderfully complex. Within each dish he wove together multiple textures and a wide range of tastes, favoring pungent combinations of sweet, salty and spicy flavors.

Mehta is a chef with an eclectic heritage—Persian by descent and Indian by birth—and the multiculturalism shows through in his cooking. A braised pork bun ($15) spiced with cinnamon, star anise and chili peppers is Chinese in form and Pakistani in flavor; seaweed spring rolls with duck ($12) are a Vietnamese-Japanese hybrid; and a pair of sliders ($15) would almost pass for purebred American if not for the unmistakably Indian taste of the beef's cardamom marinade.

Mehta made his name working as a pastry chef at such haute dining institutions as Jean Georges and Union Square Café. Like fellow dessert-dynamos-turned-restaurateurs Iacappo Falai with Falai, Pichet Ong with P*Ong and Batch, and Sam Mason with Tailor, Graffiti is Mehta’s turn to set his culinary sights beyond profiteroles and parfaits.

It’s a good sign, then, that Graffiti’s knockout dish was a savory one: pickled ginger scallops with candied red chili ($12).

If you’re in the mood for something light and flavor-packed, this thoughtful dish is not to be missed. The scallops are seared, sliced into thin disks, drizzled with a pickled ginger reduction and sprinkled with crispy, dehydrated mung beans. Warm strips of spiced flatbread served as an accompaniment, and a smear of candied red chili sauce divided the two components on the plate like a vein.

Scallops on their own often fall flat, but Mehta avoided making the little mollusks shoulder too much responsibility. The mung beans put the perfect amount of crunch in every bite, while the sweet-and-sour taste of pickled ginger was assertive but not overpowering. Meanwhile, a bite of spicy flatbread between mouthfuls accentuated the buttery flavor of the seafood. It’s an elegant dish and paired perfectly with a glass of a light sauvignon blanc or pinot noir.

By the time the plates had been scraped clean and the check paid, I was still dying to know: What's with the name?

“Graffiti is an art form that’s all around the world, but it’s also intensely personal,” said Mehta. “The four of us are also from all different places in the world, and put a lot of ourselves into the food.”