Little Italy
June 2, 2009
- Cuisine: Roman-style
- Vibe: '20s trattoria
- Occasion: Group dinner, casual date, long lunch
- Don't Miss: Grilled lamb Scottadito
- Price: Appetizers $10, entrées $18, dessert $6
- Reservations: Recommended
- Phone: (212) 966-1234
- Location: 231 Mott St., near Prince St.
Over the past few months, five Roman-style restaurants have opened in Manhattan. What is it about Roman cooking? For starters, it's simple and cheap. And right now, simple and cheap is a very good thing.
Roma means carciofi alla giuda (Jewish-style fried artichokes), fried asparagus, fried zucchini flowers stuffed with mozzarella and anchovies. Rome means salads made with fresh fava beans, chickpeas, anchovies and mint. And Pecorino Romano, a salty, aged sheep's milk cheese. Rome is also famous for pizza with wafer-thin crust topped with mozzarella, tomato, capers and anchovies. If you don't know what a Roman pie tastes like, visit Emporio, a trattoria that opened in Nolita six weeks ago.
The pie crusts at Emporio are so terrifically crunchy and thin, they're more like Frisbee-size crackers. The best pizzaiolas - the guys making the pies - are true chefs.
Chef Riccardo Buitoni has two popular restaurants in New York - Aurora SoHo and Aurora Brooklyn. This time, he wanted to try Rome and pizza. As it happens, Roman-style pizza is his forte. He tops his pies with everything from house-cured pancetta, red onion, rosemary and potato to eggplant, pesto, San Marzano tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella.
My favorite is a warm Frisbee cracker topped with super-smoky guanciale, kale and Pecorino cream. Buitoni cures the guanciale himself. As for the Pecorino cream, he melts two kinds of Pecorino into milk and the result is outstanding. Really, some of the best dishes come from the wood-burning oven, including the porchetta, made with pork from Flying Pigs Farm and a dessert calzone filled with Nutella, ricotta and walnuts.
Emporio is pretty Roman. You won't find generic Italian dishes of the Caprese salad or penne pomodoro sorts. "When in Rome" is a cliché for good reason. It's a fine credo for dining out.
When at Emporio, get the lamb scottadito. In Italian, scottadito translates to "burn your finger," meaning use your hands and gnaw the meat off the bone. Order the Stracchino cheese - a wonderfully creamy cheese from Milan - with sweet, roasted cherry tomatoes and drizzled with vincotto. Also order the fried artichokes seasoned with sea salt and lemon.
For dessert, I liked the sheep's milk ricotta tart with a rustic spelt tart and Marsala-spiked sabayon.
Not everything works at Emporio. Especially the Frascati-braised rabbit, which was Frascati-soaked and unusually fatty. Then there was the tonnarelli cacio e pepe (Pecorino cheese & black pepper sauce).
Everyone at my table was convinced someone had knocked a glass of water into our bowl in the kitchen. I'm not pointing any fingers, but the chef did mention a splash of cooking water from the pasta.
The black kale and grilled mushroom salad would have been great had it not been so aggressively dressed in egg yolk, Dijon mustard and Parmesan.
The atmosphere at Emporio is laidback - salvaged wood benches, white subway tile walls, ripped brown paper place mats and tin bread buckets. Yet, Buitoni seems dedicated to organic ingredients and thoughtful cooking.
He's also a surprisingly talented pizzaiola, which makes Emporio a pizzeria with a lot of other good food on the menu.
April 14, 2009
- Cuisine: Italian
- Vibe: Rock 'n' roll trattoria
- Occasion: Business lunch, romantic date, family affair
- Don't Miss: Squid-ink tagliatelle, Scuderia pizza, buttermilk panna cotta
- Price: Appetizers, $9; entrées, $18; dessert, $8.50
- Reservations: Accepted
- Phone: (212) 206-9111
- Location: 10 Downing St., between Bleecker and Houston.
Stand at the corner of Downing St. and Sixth Ave. and take a look around. What you may be seeing is the core of a New Little Italy, complete with neighborhood feuds and family businesses passed down to the next generation.
The old Little Italy, to the east and downtown, is slowly fading away. But here are Bar Pitti, Da Silvano, Silvano Bistecca and Scuderia, which just opened six weeks ago.
Thirty years ago, Silvano Marchetto opened Da Silvano - it's upscale, it's hard to get into, it's like a celebrity supper club of sorts. But if you're not fancy enough to get into Da Silvano, you can sneak into Scuderia.
This restaurant was opened by Silvano, his daughter, Leyla, and two other owners. Da Silvano's got white tablecloths and $38 veal Milanese. Scuderia got album covers on the walls and a $9 grilled cheese. Nothing in the decor says what kind of food it serves. It looks like a record store where they still sell vinyl and blast classic rock. It serves comfort food - pizzas, pastas, paninis, soups, salads and ice cream sundaes.
Scuderia is really an Italian diner. Bacon and eggs? It's called the Occhio di Bue pizza, and it's topped with mozzarella, thick and crispy pancetta, pecorino, spinach leaves and a sunny-side-up egg. I never thought I'd love jam pizza, but at Scuderia, it's wonderful. If you ordered a jam pie in America, it would come slathered with strawberry jelly, Velveeta and Spam.
Scuderia uses fig jam, sharp blue cheese and speck (ham), so it's actually Mediterranean, not just Italian, and much more cosmopolitan. The kitchen's great skill is in building bacon and eggs, and jam and ham, on a construction site of flatbread. Peanut butter & jelly sandwich? They've got that, too.
The tramezzini section - crustless white-bread sandwiches - were a gruesome discovery. The prosciutto and mushroom tramezzino tasted like soggy Wonder Bread with baloney, mushrooms and mayonnaise. The artichoke and fontina-stuffed tramezzino was just as dreadful. Skip the sandwiches and focus your attention on the seafood.
I loved the squid-ink tagliatelle with fresh fish and a great, garlicky tomato sauce. The frittura mista is a generous heap of battered calamari, tilapia, shrimp, green beans and sweet potato with a homemade tartar sauce. I'd order the brick-flattened Cornish hen for the jus-bathed potatoes.
Oh, and stash a few salt packets in your pocket before you go to Scuderia. A lot of dishes needed it. The gnocchi tasted like warm potato blobs in a tasteless butter-and-sage sauce. Who would've thought minestrone soup would be a low-sodium experience? But an order of rock-hard meatballs was too far gone to be saved merely by salt.
If nothing else, Scuderia is a great spot for dessert. Even if you do snag a table at Da Silvano, cross the street for dessert. My favorite is the buttermilk panna cotta - silky and smooth, yet unusually light. Then there's the tiramisu - a do-it-yourself collection of lady fingers, zabaglione and a cup of liqueur-spiked espresso.
The only bad one in the bunch is the gnocchi dolci, stuffed with pineapple and pine nuts in maple syrup.
Is the food fabulous at Scuderia? No. But it's not bad either. Not bad at all.
