coba1
After over a year’s worth of speculation and curiosity, the public will have its opportunity to experience all that Coba Cocina, the new restaurant at the corner of Richmond Road and St. Margaret Drive in the Idle Hour Shopping Center, has to offer when it opens on March 18.
And it’s a lot.
From the food to the architecture to the unique concept, Coba Cocina is certainly a distinct Lexington restaurant, and a dream years in the making for the project’s founders, father-and-son Phil and Lee Greer of Greer Companies, a local hospitality and real estate development company headquartered in Lexington whose portfolio also includes 35 Cheddar’s restaurants in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, West Virginia and North Carolina.
The restaurant is actually three separate, but complementary, concepts: Cocoh! Confectioner, a bakery, cafe and gelateria; Cobar Cantina, an upstairs lounge with a specific small pate (tapas) menu; and Coba Cocina, the intricately decorated downstairs restaurant with seating for nearly 230 people (the entire building can sit upwards of 400 people).
The cuisine, managed by chef Alejandro Velasquez, is “pan-American,” according to Lee Greer, and is inspired by dishes from Mexico, South and Latin America, the Baja and Texas. Coba menu specialities include ceviche, brisket tacos, a Cubano sandwich, agave-bbq glazed ribs, chicken monterey and “pescado de Yucatan.” Coba will offer lunch and dinner, as well as a variety of breakfast items in Cocoh.
Coba is an increasingly popular ruined city of the Mayan civilization on the eastern Gulf Coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
The building’s interior motif, was inspired by “cenotes” – a type of sea cave characteristic of Yucatan which were important sources of water and other aspects of the Mayan civilization. The piece de resistance of the restaurant is a gargantuan, 3,000-gallon jellyfish aquarium – the largest private container of its kind in the world – home to a hundred Moon Jelly jellyfish. At 20 feet high, the cylindrical aquarium is visible from nearly everywhere in the nearly 12,000-square-foot building.
Many other features in the restaurant feed into this nautical and cenote-cave theme, from the 38-foot-wide dome perched on top of the building, to the sparkling blue ceiling panels and the wavy, scale-like, “fish panel” walls. Many other pieces and installations play into the Mayan theme, with a row of panels of “glyphs” lining the exterior and a ornate, hand-hammered front door pulls at the front entrance.
“Everything has a purpose, every little detail has a story for us,” Greer said. “Hopefully it comes together so when you’re driving by at night it looks like something different, but cool. And something Lexington can be proud of.”
Dozens of local and central Kentucky craftspeople and professionals contributed to the various components of the building’s full rendering, and Greer is excited to finally be able to show off their work.
“When this thing was under construction, it was a hodgepodge of all kinds of crazy stuff,” Greer said. “You had a bunch of people that thought we had just dumped a bunch of leftover building material on to a job site and started throwing it together. But now, with the outside really coming together and done, you can get a full appreciation. It is an amazing work of art by the architects and all the craftspeople we had working on it.”