What happens when one of the city’s preeminent power-Italian restaurants with a celebrated kitchen and illustrious clientele moves from its 12-year home into historic, larger and sexier digs up the block?
If you’re Il Gattopardo, you get dropped from the Zagat Survey, where its food earned a 24 ranking on a 30-point scale just last year.
The 2014 book’s dopey diss means the Google-owned guide needs a set of Google Glasses. Sure, Il Gattopardo’s stayed largely below the downtown- and Brooklyn-obsessed media radar, but not in Zagat?
Survey founder Tim Zagat claims it’s because of uncertainty over the move, although the new spot opened the day after the old one closed. And while it’s included in the online version, the entry is the snotty one from last year, including a reference to waiters with “thick accents.”
Sometimes, a 3-star review is about more than food. As the first critic to review the original, 13 years ago, I’ll say it upfront: I irrationally love Il Gattopardo and its sister restaurant uptown, the Leopard at des Artistes — the former Cafe des Artistes, which the same owners rescued from oblivion.
Il Gattopardo provides a classic New York oasis of gustatory pleasure for a cloutful clientele. Its move last month from cramped and narrow digs at 33 W. 54th St. to the former Aquavit space in the Rockefeller Townhouses at 11-13 W. 54th St. re-energized longtime chef Vito Gnazzo. His Neapolitan-inspired cooking crackles as never before.
Gianfranco Sorrentino and his partners, a quartet of Cushman & Wakefield deal makers, launched Il Gattopardo on Sept. 18, 2001. Although miles from the horror downtown, Midtown hotels were empty and streets hushed after dark.
If the post-9/11 pall wasn’t awful enough, the block between Fifth and Sixth avenues was a mess thanks to MoMA construction across the street that sent tremors through the dining room. But customers shrugged it off and returned again and again. Il Gattopardo emerged as a symbol of post-9/11 resiliency and soon ranked with East Midtown’s more publicized San Pietro, Cellini and Fresco by Scotto.
After Aquavit moved a block north in 2005, the two-level townhouse it left behind swallowed up three other eateries. But Il Gattopardo’s in for keeps. The vast lower level is now a private-event space. The ground-floor dining room resembles the near-undecorated, yet cozy, original, but it’s been opened up and given breathing and elbow room. Faces glow under recessed lighting reflecting off long, mirrored walls of white poplar.
You might spot regulars Paul McCartney (for whom Gnazzo cooks vegetarian) and Nancy Shevell, Stanley Tucci, performance artist Marina Abramovic, Miuccia Prada, real estate moguls Sam Zell and Jerry Speyer, Tilda Swinton, Naomi Campbell, CIT Group chairman John Thain, MoMA director Glenn Lowry and what seems most of the museum’s curatorial staff.
Yet the menu gives nothing away to power players’ and showbiz types’ calorie-counting tastes. It boldly builds on the hearty traditions of Naples and the Campania region.
Old favorites haven’t changed much. Silken vitello tonnato takes on rare character via a surfeit of anchovy. Mozzarella in carozza is one of the city’s great, stealth grilled cheese sandwiches, a blissful blur of buffalo mozzarella and anchovies not deep-fried, but pan-sauteed on crunchy country bread.
Neapolitan meatloaf remains luxuriously soft and aromatically herbal. But Gnazzo’s real strength has always been pasta. Long, flat-sided scialatelli convey and commingle the flavors of mussels, shrimp and scallops in peppery tomato sauce. “Is this Michael White?” a guest said of spaghetti bottarga made with dry grey mullet roe.
Of course, Il Gattopardo costs a bundle if you pick certain $40-and-up main courses (although pasta costs half as much, and that great meat loaf is just $24). Not all the waiters know the wine list. The room can be as noisy as a downtown brasserie, and newcomers may feel less well-coddled than regulars who take up so many seats.
But it’s a grand institution worthy of its new noble setting, even if Zagat hasn’t a clue.