WITH Columbus Day around the corner, what’s the culinary buzz all about? Vegetarian menus. Asian noodle bars. “Molecular” desserts.
But what are New Yorkers actually eating in restaurants? Italian – so much Italian you’d get sick of it if the cuisine didn’t have the benefit, on balance, of tasting better than all others comparably priced.
Italian is polyglot New York City’s national cuisine. It outnumbers all other kinds of restaurants – the Zagat Survey 2007 carries seven columns of them (about 370 places), compared with five columns of American, four columns of French and two of Japanese.
And the Italian Battalion keeps marching on. This year has seen a proliferation of moderately priced openings – from scenester-oriented Gemma in the Bowery Hotel to traditional Fiorini on East 56th Street.
These are banner times for Italian eateries of all kinds. They’re the real culinary news, even as many in the media continue to dwell on every monotonous ounce of miso black cod.
Their pleasures are too many to count. The classics include Fiorini chef Erminio Conte’s silken stracciatella, the egg-drop spinach soup of central and northern Italy. The forward include Michael White’s steroidal risotto at Alto, with rice stirred in duck fat. Take your pick – I’ll take both.
The past two years saw a quartet of ambitious launches – Del Posto, A Voce, Abbocatto and Insieme – that differ in every respect but one: marvelous food that nimbly, but respectfully, stretches The Boot’s culinary boundaries.
Fiamma, L’Impero and Alto, only slightly older, are re-energized with new chefs and new menus. If seven eateries as impressive as these don’t establish Italian as the cuisine to beat, I don’t know what could.
All of them, to one degree or another, took their cue from Mario Batali’s Babbo, which liberated chefs from the traditional playbook. That can still take courage, even when menus don’t stray nearly as far from their Italian roots as Batali’s.
Centolire owner Pino Luongo, who thrilled locals with a cosmopolitan take on Tuscan cooking in the 1980s and ’90s, once said, “The popularity of Italian cuisine in America is based on familiarity.”
New Yorkers today are more familiar with Italian “regional” cooking, an elusive ideal dependent on local products that are rarely exported. Yet A Voce’s executive chef, Andrew Carmellini, is sometimes reminded how passionately, and wrongly, some diners cling to ideas about what “Italian” means.
A few days ago, Carmellini chuckled, “I got a scolding in the dining room. This person grabbed my hand and said, ‘This is not polenta – I know how to make polenta.’
“Now, I was in Piedmont last spring, where we sourced the greatest polenta. My grandmother is from Friuli, land of the polenta eaters. I got a distributor to send us thousands and thousands of dollars worth.
“But this customer didn’t like it as much as Jimmy Dean [packaged polenta]. It hurt a little.”
The more conservative new places offer some authentic products as well. This year’s midpriced, mainstream newcomers are not red-sauce joints, despite the stray tomato dish. Nor is a strand of angel hair primavera to be found.
Rather, they typically combine favorite dishes from all over the country – although still “more from the south than the north,” says Fiorini owner Lello Arpaia, “and often adapted to New York taste.” For what other cuisine isn’t that also true?
Fiorini’s hand-rolled cavatelli with tomato sauce and smoked mozzarella comes from southern Italy; shellfish risotto with carnaroli rice from the north; and baby Cornish hen scarpiello, rich in garlic and rosemary, is “an immigrant invention,” Lello Arpaia said.
What’s charming is that this sun-drenched, basically simple cuisine beloved of many mature New Yorkers has been embraced at venues catering to the scene-conscious young – a trend that started last spring at Keith McNally’s Morandi.
Bocca claims to be Roman. Academia di Vino promotes itself as wine-driven; its menu includes a surprise or two, like trofie al pesto, the rare Genoese pasta to pop up on a local menu. Bar Stuzzichini boasts small plates, while Gemma positions itself as a hip, no-reservations scene for downtown denizens.
For all their differences in location and clientele, their menus are surprisingly alike. There are truckloads of Roman-style fried artichokes; whole roasted branzino to spare; and orecchiette with broccoli rabe practically everywhere.
Maybe they’ll teach the kids to give miso black cod a rest.