The team behind Taqueria Ramirez has opened a small seafood wine bar on Cornelia Street, trading carnitas for shrimp, sardines and a list of natural wines.
El Camarón Peludo opened September 16 in the West Village. Co-owners Giovanni Cervantes and Tania Apolinar are working with chef Carlos Barrera on a menu that moves between Mexican seafood cooking and Spanish bar food.
Shrimp in many forms
The restaurant’s name means “the hairy shrimp,” and shrimp appears throughout the menu: peel-and-eat, grilled, in a cocktail and as red-prawn carpaccio with garlic. Sardine tacos, aguachile tostadas, oysters, boquerones with tomatoes and Basque cheesecake broaden the field.
The wine list follows the food across borders, with bottles from Mexico, Spain and France and an emphasis on lighter reds and orange wines. Beer is deliberately limited. Caviar, inevitably for the neighborhood, is available by the bump or gram.
The opening gives the Ramirez group a different kind of room. Its Greenpoint taqueria built a reputation on precision and scarcity: a tight menu, limited hours and little excess. El Camarón Peludo translates that confidence into an evening format designed for lingering.
The details
- Where: 20 Cornelia Street, between Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue
- Opened: September 16, 2026
- What to expect: Seafood small plates and natural wine
Source: Eater New York.
From taqueria to wine bar
The most interesting thing about El Camarón Peludo may be what the Ramirez team chose not to repeat. A successful restaurant often creates pressure for a sequel that looks reassuringly like the original. Here, the move from a tightly focused Greenpoint taqueria to a seafood-and-wine bar in the West Village changes the rhythm of the meal as much as the ingredients.
Tacos remain part of the vocabulary, but the larger structure encourages grazing. Oysters can lead to sardines, shrimp can lead to wine, and a quick stop can stretch into dinner. That makes the restaurant suited to Cornelia Street, where small dining rooms and bars have long depended on the pleasure of deciding not to leave yet.
The seafood focus also gives the kitchen a broad geographic range without requiring a sprawling menu. Mexican coastal preparations can sit beside Spanish bar traditions because the common language is direct: shellfish, preserved fish, acid, chiles and wine. The point is not to collapse the cuisines into one another but to let a bar menu move between them.
Natural wine is a predictable presence in contemporary downtown restaurants, but here it makes structural sense. Lighter reds, orange wines and bottles from Mexico, Spain and France can move across a meal made up of small plates more easily than a list organized around steakhouse conventions. The limited beer selection reinforces the identity of the room as a wine bar rather than a taqueria with an expanded drinks program.
A different kind of scarcity
Taqueria Ramirez became known partly through constraint. The menu was focused, the hours mattered and customers learned that getting what they wanted required paying attention. El Camarón Peludo has a different challenge. A wine bar depends less on urgency than atmosphere. People need a reason to stay after the first plate.
That is why the small details matter. Peel-and-eat shrimp establishes informality. Red-prawn carpaccio and caviar introduce luxury. Boquerones and oysters encourage another glass. Basque cheesecake supplies the familiar final move. The menu can be read as a sequence of reasons to keep the table for a little longer.
It is too early to treat the restaurant as a settled institution, and this is not a review based on an anonymous visit. What can be said now is that Cervantes, Apolinar and Barrera have chosen a more difficult path than cloning a hit. They are testing whether the precision associated with Ramirez can survive a looser, longer evening.
That makes El Camarón Peludo worth watching. The question is not whether the West Village needed another natural-wine bar. It is what this particular team can do with one.
For diners, the sensible approach is to treat the menu as a progression rather than a survey. Start with something cold or briny, add a taco or shrimp preparation, and let the wine determine whether the meal expands. That is the advantage of a bar organized around small plates: dinner can remain provisional until everyone decides otherwise.
Cornelia Street is an exacting place to try the idea. The West Village has no shortage of small restaurants selling intimacy at a premium. A new room has to develop a personality quickly. El Camarón Peludo begins with a useful one: seafood, wine and the confidence to be different from the restaurant that made its owners famous.
