People often ask me for restaurant recommendations and I very happily give them. When someone says, "I need a great Italian place," my response without fail is that for Italian in the city you can't do better then Babbo. Babbo most accurately recreates the food I am served when I am in Italy. In fact, the only place that even comes close to it in authenticity is Babbo's little brother Lupa, which for the right situations is sometimes, in my opinion, actually better.
Every now and then someone takes my advice and goes to Babbo and comes back to give me a ration of grief about the fact that they did not want "fancy food," they wanted "Italian food, you know chicken parm." It has long been my belief that we need a new word for this food, the American version of Italian. Well made, it is fantastic food; there are few things in the world as good as my friend Fatnucci's mom's Sunday gravy. But in all of my Italian travels I have never been offered anything I've heard Tony ask Carmela for on the Sopranos. In fact, I know of no one born in Europe that knows what Prahzooot is.
Del Posto is open, and never has there been a greater need for a word that separates the authentic food of Italy from Italian American food then now. I don't want to have to go through the discussion I know will ensue when someone tells me they want great Italian food, I send them to Posto, and they come back having learned what testa is, all upset that the restaurant didn't have "Gavagool" or some other Soprano’s dish.
The truth is that Italian food is never more genius than when some mother is making a tasteful dinner out of the parts of the animal or the garden that Americans have pretty much forgotten exist. The empire of Mario Batali, Joe and Lidia Bastianich, and Marc Ladner has long thrived on the fact that most Americans are impressed that somehow a chef managed to make their filet mignon tender so, in a subtle bit of irony, some of us will pay large sums of money for the cheapest cuts of meat, if they are expertly prepared. How big do you think the New York market for Squab liver was before Mario put it in those amazing raviolis at Babbo?
Walking into Del Posto is like walking onto someone's movie set of the awesome restaurant all the well-heeled Veronan's went to in their tuxes straight from the opera. It is enormous, it is gorgeous inlaid marble, it is sweeping staircases with elaborately wrought iron, and it is half-circle cantilevered balcony tables. It begs you to drag a smoke machine in, set some shafts of light up, and make photos of the good life.
I toured Del Posto two months ago, while they were still under construction, and I could not wrap my head around how this monstrous cavern of a space could ever be turned into a convivial place to dine. Not only did they make it convivial, it is actually warm. There is enough room between the tables to drive a series of large carts that a large percentage of the menu is served from, yet the room feels cozy, the lighting is right, and ochres, siennas, browns, and creams mix to make this airplane hangar of a room feel like a spacious town house.
All this room is needed not only for the carts but also for the staff. Obviously, the Posto team decided that this restaurant was going to have fine service, and they have assured this with legions of staff. There are a lot of people in this place paying attention to every detail of service; our table was crumbed between every single course. There are staff around at all times, easily grabbed for any thing you may decide you need. If the place was ten square feet smaller, or their was even one more person with a pitcher of water, it might feel encroaching but, as it is, it seems to be walking just on the right side of that thin line. As confidence develops and this group has lived in this room a while, I suspect diners will all be using words like "impeccable" to describe it.
The wine list has champagne! an enormous selection of the world's greatest champagnes. I can only assume that when Morgan Rich and Joe Bastianich got together and decided to stray from the Batali/Bastianich tradition of serving only the wines of the country they are serving food from, they agreed that the diversion could only be done if done exceptionally.
The wine list also represents a commitment to communal enjoyment of the Del Posto experience in the depth of its collection of large format bottles. The coolest tables in the place are the ones in the balcony that will accommodate eight to ten people and, if you end up there in those numbers, the three-liter bottle of Paola Bea Sagrentino de Montefalco will definitely be a great bottle to finish your night with.
Sadly, we were only four, so our best attack at the wine list was to pick a couple of the Italian gems we have always wanted (out of a list comprised entirely of gems). We had:
96 Billecart Salmon Brut Rose, Cuvee Elisabeth, which is quickly becoming my second favorite pink champers. The 96 had a wonderful citrus mid-palate, with orange water and lemon notes.
90 Marcarini Barberesco Pertinace. Sadly, this was a bad bottle. When we opened it, it smelled of a cellar. Not necessarily bad, but funky. I held it all through the meal hoping it would blow off and show some fruit. At the end of our meal it hadn't, so I asked Morgan to taste it and confirm whether this was right and it was just that Old World, or whether maybe someone in Piedmonte hadn't washed all the bots as well as they should. He agreed the wine was not in its glory and took it off the check, which was appreciated but unnecessary; bottle variation happens.
99 Contadi di Turasi. Chosen by the wine team for us, this was a fun bottle. Caramel, toast, and fruit on the nose, in the middle of the nose was model airplane glue and one of the spices in an Indian five-spice. It had a laser-like focus of ripe raspberry on the palate, while still showing some Old World funk. It didn't evolve far, but it was cool and all over the place.
01 Tenuta dell'Ornellaia Masseto. The best part about knowing for sure we were finally going to try this wine, on this night, in this place, was that it gave the house the chance to decant it about an hour and half before we drank it. By the time we moved on to it, the new woodnotes had dropped back enough to let all the crushed red fruit and licorice come up to the front. This is the nice kind of modern wine.
90 Quinterelli Bandito. This is a special wine, only produced in the best vintages, and it was a hard one to get my head around. It smelled terrible, wood and resin, almost as strong as Retsina, with all kinds of ethanol and grappa. Yet on the palate, it was delightful ripe figs, quince paste and roasted yellow apples.
All of the food started with an amuse bouche. It was cauliflower, lemon and parsley fried in a tight white crust that I can only guess was some version of tempura made with Wondra or some other super-light flour. More than tasting good, this bite was made to assure you that the legion of people working in the biggest kitchen I have ever seen know exactly how to make things just the way they want to. Somehow, the crust of this little nibble was as crisp as I imagine it could be without discoloring the starches at all; it was pure white.
As far as the rest of the menu goes, it is a very large sampling of indigenous Italian food, very little of which I have seen offered in New York (including at the Empire's other places). In attendance for this extravaganza were Helmet, Pichon, Afro and myself. I distinctly remember seeing things on the menu that were not offal, but for some reason we didn't seem to order any of them. This is a group of people who eagerly seek the opportunity to eat unique food and, sadly, chances to eat expertly prepared offal don’t seem to come up on this continent nearly enough. And then this happened:
From the antipasti section we had:
Cotechino with Lentils and Aceto Tradizionale di Modena: Boiled pork sausage scented with autumn spices on top of lentils, cooked with mirepoix and a drizzle of what we call balsamic vinegar.
Grilled radicchio trevisano with Fonduta: basically the bitterness of charred radicchio with the creaminess of fontina melted in cream.
Veal sweetbreads Picatta: actually a veal sweetbread crusted and served on a butter, lemon, garlic and white wine sauce.
Salumi misti with Erbazzone: A mixture of house-cured meats, lardo, guanciale, coppa, fennel salumi, testa, and lonza with a savory pastry in the center, stuffed with Swiss chard and wrapped in pancetta.
From the Primi section we selected three pastas and one risotto, which were served with each choice divaided into four plates divered one at a time in courses. Mario has made it his credo that pasta is the center of a pasta dish and that sauce should act a condiment, not a bath. So far it has worked for him without fail and in the end, looking back on the meal, all of our favorites were in this course. We had:
Pici Cibreo and Black Truffles: Pici is a thick strand eggless pasta, black truffles are tubers and Cibero is a pretty famous restaurant in Florence. As far as I know this is their famous dish and it is a creamy sauce with duck testicles and cock's combs.
Pappardelle Wild Boar: A wide flat noodle with a long, slow-cooked, savory wild boar ragu.
Ravioli chestnuts partridge: The ravioli themselves were thin and dark grey, the seam was about the same size as the pocket of stuffing which gave it the room to let its edge crisp up a little in the pan with the butter.
Risotto with Barolo and Castelmango: these ingredients come together to become a homogenization of the earth of Barolo, the nuttiness of Castelmango (cheese) and the creamy starches and toothsomeness of the Arborio. It is all lent sweetness by the carrot puree upon which it is served.
From the Secondi section we chose:
Mixed Grill from the Macellaio for 4 with Chicory Salad: The meats "from the butcher" that make up this mixed grill were: lamb-chop, sweet pork sausage, quail, calves' liver, and pork belly, all topped with some dressed bitter greens.
Bollito Misto: because we don't know when to leave well enough alone, we added this to share around. It was comprised of: testina, tongue, zamponi, veal shank, and capon thigh all boiled with some autum spices.
From Dolci we had:
Formaggio Taste of Three Served with Aceto tradizionale di Modena, Lambrusco Jelly, Honeycomb, and Pear Mostarda: pieces of two year, four year, and six year-old Parmigiano.
Assagi di Ciccolato
Three Chocolates: Plantation Organic 38% Cocoa Butter from Ecuador; Nobless 43% Cocoa Butter from Sicily; Weiss 70% Cocoa Butter from France. This was served with three tastes of rum.
Zabaglione: served with pears and crumbled pistachio cookies.
I went with simple explanations of each course here rather than throwing in words like wonderful, fantastic, ethereal or lovely, because they would seem redundant. With the exception of the Pici pasta (wich is awesome), I have had all of these before, both in Italy and here (when I could find them) and, across the board, these are the finest examples I have ever had. Everything was as good as it could be and, if you have had, or want to have, Bollito Misto, this is the best representation of the dish I have ever had.
It is hard to report on Del Posto without addressing all the talk about the restaurant being Mario's bid to get four stars. I can say for sure that the room and the service are at that level. As far as the food goes, we obviously stuck to the most humble of dishes and it is not often that humble things like boiled offal are discussed at a four-star level. I will say that, with Mark Ladner in charge of the kitchen, I rest easy that the quality of ingredient is beyond reproach. And I am confident in saying, based on this one experience, that it is absolutely the most excellently prepared Italian food I have ever had in America.
Will Count Frank Bruni grant the Empire the first ever four-star review of an Italian place (assuming he overlooks that he was a cog in their promotion wheel and does review it in spite of his announcement piece)? I don't know and don't care; I like to picture Mario, Lidia, and the boys are far above all that crap. You open a restaurant to share a passion with the world and make some money. This group has had a lot of success at that so far and this place shows they are clearly at the top of their game.
"Every now and then someone takes my advice and goes to Babbo and comes back to give me a ration of grief about the fact that they did not want "fancy food," they wanted "Italian food, you know chicken parm."
That is a classic - I have been telling people the same thing for the last couple of years. When most people in the states say Italian, they mean East Coast "Pizzeria" food - tomato sauce and mozzarella smothered whatever... which has very little to do with real Italian food.
Posted by: Anthony | November 07, 2006 at 03:36 PM