Carbone’s veal Parmesan is now No. 2. (
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You’ve tried the rest, now try the best — not pizza, which touts its alleged superiority on every box, but chicken parmigiana that only looks like pizza.
What might be called “chicken pizzagiana,” a round, 13-inch-diameter replica of a Ray’s pie at new Quality Italian, is the summer’s runaway whimsical hit — good, clean fun in a season of neo-molecular, quasi-Korean and counterfeit Latin departures.
Served on a tabletop stand, the visual pun makes you laugh: “Think of this shape in relation to the shape of a chicken,” my friend cackled.
But the taste made us smile. Richly herbed, luxuriantly juicy, it’s worlds removed from the insipid, common article. The toothsome breadcrumb crust is what you want real pizza dough to be.
Call it the dish that ate the corner of Sixth Avenue and 57th Street, where the two-level restaurant opened a week ago.
It could also be the dish that ate Quality Italian. At $52 for two — although big enough for four who take human-size bites — it’s so popular that half the 100-seat upstairs dining room seems to order it; executive chef Scott Tacinelli says they usually run out by 10 p.m.
Some diners are too enthusiastic. Saturday night, two happy young women knocked the whole shebang — chicken slices, stand and condiments — onto the floor.
This might not be what owner Michael Stillman’s Fourth Wall Restaurants had in mind. Quality Italian, after all, is a steakhouse, with prime “butcher’s cuts” priced at $46 and $48.
For my money, the chicken pizzagiana blows away the $50, inch-thick veal Parmesan (as they call it) at Carbone — until now, the year’s most talked-about riff on classic Italian-American cooking.
But while Carbone’s hit looks like veal Parmesan, Quality Italian’s not-pizza would fool anyone. It grew out of experiments to hip up the cliché. “One idea was a boned-out chicken stuffed with pasta,” Tacinelli recalls. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed.
The basic prep is simple: Breast meat is ground with house-dried spices, spread out on a round pan and caked in fresh, spiced breadcrumbs. It’s fried, topped with fresh-made San Marzano tomato sauce and Pecorino, Parmesan and mozzarella cheeses and basil before a turn in the oven.
The result tastes, and registers on the tongue, like more than chicken — uniformly moist throughout its half-inch depth, and possessed of an herbal complexion as might come off a North African grill.
In fact, Tacinelli says he had a shwarma-like “meatball” partly in mind, although the herbs are all Italian, including oregano and bay leaf. Another secret: “We use a little dark meat to keep it moist.”
It’s served with Ray’s-style jars of sprinkle-on black olives, garlic powder, peperoncino — and a bowl of honey from Union Square Greenmarket’s Andrew’s Honey. Sourced from Central Park hives, it’s cut with dried Calabrian chili.
I can do without honey on chicken that looks like pizza. Of course, pizza that looks like chicken might be another story. I hope it doesn’t give Tacinelli ideas.
scuozzo@nypost.com