About Us
Meet iara
iara is a Brazilian open-kitchen restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, inspired by the Amazon Rainforest. The name comes from Iara, a water goddess from Amazonian legend.
The Amazon is the most biodiverse place on earth, and iara builds its menu around its rarest, most singular flavors. The range runs from reimagined Brazilian classics to the flavors of the rainforest, with the warmth of a Brazilian home table and the polish of an elevated dining room.
Meet Chef Vitor Mendes
Owner and Executive Chef
Chef Vitor started working in restaurants at 15 to help support his family and found his calling almost immediately. Soon after, he enrolled in culinary school at the Institute of Culinary Education and went on to spend over a decade in some of New York's most demanding kitchens, including Theodora, Frevo, the Fulton by Jean-Georges, and Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare.
During the peak of his culinary career, Vitor’s life and cooking changed course after his father's passing, and in 2021, he returned to Brazil to reconnect with his roots, traveling and cooking across the country for the first time. Everything shifted deep in the Amazon, where he spent a month learning about the ingredients and their culture.
The shift did not go unnoticed. Vitor was a finalist in the S.Pellegrino Young Chef Academy Competition in 2022. In 2023, he was recruited by chef Tomer Blechman to take the reins at Theodora alongside him. In 2025, he was named a StarChefs NYC Rising Star.
Today, Vitor is channeling all of it into iara, his first restaurant as founder. It's where his two worlds finally meet: the precision of his fine-dining pedigree and the wild, ingredient-led cooking he discovered in the Amazon, brought together at iara in New York City.
