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I’m standing in a basement under Allen Street when the chef Vitor Goularte Mendes—who is gearing up to open his first restaurant, Iara—takes out three plastic pouches of Amazonian spices. He asks me to hold out my palm so he can give me some powdered tucupi. I don’t know what tucupi is; he tells me it’s fermented cassava juice. Maybe it’s the color, but it smells a bit like mustard, without the edge, and tastes citric. There’s cupuaçu (quite sour, a cousin of cocoa) and pimenta jiquitaia, which he mixes into a bowl with the tucupi, cupuaçu, and some tomato powder. “This is going to be great for chicken,” he says. There’s more. A frozen bottle of (liquid) tucupi, cocoa nibs that have a touch of anise, a big jar of smoked biquinho peppers that taste like being at a barbecue.

Mendes brought all these ingredients back after his most recent trip to Brazil, where he was joined by two of his investors and six suitcases. They’re all being put to use at Iara, which Mendes describes as “inspired by the Amazon,” set to open this fall at 205 Allen Street. (It’s a couple storefronts down from Korean diner Kisa.) The space is still under construction, but he has the gas on and a liquor license. One room has been brightly painted in a style Mendes calls “tropical abstract.” Those bright colors will be avoided in the main dining room because Mendes and his designers, Studio WDM’s Luisa Farani and William DeMoraes, wanted to avoid tropical clichés, and to draw inspiration from the Amazon’s source, its soil.