Tiny meatballs (bottom) do their best Pac-Man impressions but were dry and flavorless, and lobster Campidanese was cold and partially cooked. (
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At 10 p.m., one hour and 15 minutes after we were seated, the Corvo Bianco waiter assured our starving selves, “Your entrees are almost on the way.” This jolly new Italian jumbo on Columbus Avenue is on its way to finito if palatechallenged locals ever catch on.
Maybe they won’t. On the Upper West Side, north of 72nd Street, good restaurants close instantly and horrible ones thrive through multiple mayoral regimes.
It may seem unfair to stink-bomb an ambitious, 225-seater after two visits. But the crowds packing the voluminous void that was previously Calle Ocho, which moved around the corner, might not care what a critic has to say.
I wanted to like Corvo Bianco not just because I was first to report the lease-signing last year. It’s well-priced (starters and salads $6 to $17, pasta $17 to $20, mains in the $20s). Executive chef Elizabeth Falkner boasts James Beard accolades, star turns on the Food Network and Bravo, and strong reviews at Boerum Hill’s pizza-driven Krescendo.
The greeting’s warm: Friendly managers usher you past the roaring bar (great cocktails!) into the newly festive main room. Architects restored a long-covered skylight and beautified the brick and timber walls with attractive metal trellises and plants.
The design has one flaw, though: The food comes through the kitchen. Whatever case Falkner is trying to make for “coastal Italian” is sucked down a well of concept-neutral, inept execution.
Our enthusiastic waiter did his best to walk and talk us through the carnage. The first time, he sadly reported they were “not serving” three of eight entrees. Nor was there bread — a trattoria without bread? — except for a few sticks in paper wrappers.
Sweet, flavorful prawns in light romesco sauce promised more good things to come. But tiny, dry and flavorless meatballs arrived tucked into stale profiteroles propped open to resemble Pac-Man. “Fava beans” was a misspelling of “95 percent corn niblets.” Rampant, purplish sauce made goat-cheese agnolotti look, and taste, like one giant beet.
Our reward for daring to return was a dark, Siberian corner of the remote rear because better tables were “reserved,” although I saw no one take them.
This time they offered flatbread: It arrived, thoroughly burnt, as the couple at the next table was sending back cold scallops. At least large-leaf kale salad was blessed with spirited lemon anchovy dressing, chopped egg and pecorino.
But scialatielli pasta with whole littleneck clams, harmless at best, evinced scant evidence on the tongue of chilies visible to the eye. They gifted us with pizzetta finocchio — limp flatbread topped with a pittance of fennel, provolone and pecorino.
Branzino’s severed head looked glum for cause: The skin was grilled to near-cinders, the flesh to a gray turn lacking seasoning or moisture.
They recommended lobster Campidanese — poached, removed from the shell, fennel- and garlic-sauced, put back in the shell and finished in the oven.
It looked swell. But was it supposed to be as cold as if from the deepest corner of the fridge? Nope: They forgot the oven. Parts seemed not cooked at all. They nicely took it off our bill.
I tried only one dessert, inexplicably called “In the City” — a confusion of mascarpone cheesecake, blueberries and graham crumble. Think of the way a hotel ballroom rubber-chicken affair ends, long after it’s time to go home.