iara is a Brazilian open-kitchen restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, inspired by the Amazon Rainforest. The Restaurant is named after Iara, a water goddess from Amazonian legend.
The Amazon is the most biodiverse place on earth, and iara builds its menu around its most distinctive flavors. The menu ranges from reimagined Brazilian classics to rainforest flavors, with the warmth of a Brazilian home table and the polish of an elevated dining room.
Vitor Mendes is the Brazilian-American Owner and Executive Chef of iara, a Brazilian open-kitchen restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, inspired by the Amazon Rainforest. He started working in restaurants at 15 to help support his family, then enrolled at the Institute of Culinary Education and spent over a decade in some of New York’s most demanding kitchens, including Theodora, the Fulton by Jean-Georges and Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare.
After his father’s passing, Vitor returned to Brazil in 2021 to reconnect with his roots, and everything shifted deep in the Amazon, where he spent a month learning about the ingredients and their culture. He became a finalist in the S.Pellegrino Young Chef Academy Competition in 2022, took the reins at Theodora alongside chef Tomer Blechman in 2023, and was named a StarChefs NYC Rising Star in 2025.
iara is his first restaurant, where the precision of his fine-dining pedigree meets the wild, ingredient-led cooking he discovered in the Amazon.