Food & Drink

East Side says salud to Salumeria

Risotto takes on a doughnut’s shape encased in prosciutto in Salumeria’s “rustic and elegant” savarin del parmacotto.

Risotto takes on a doughnut’s shape encased in prosciutto in Salumeria’s “rustic and elegant” savarin del parmacotto. (Gabi Porter (2))

All hail Cesare Casella! The chef’s classic Italian cooking is superb, but the team at his second Salumeria Rosi outpost, on the Upper East Side, needs to up their game. (
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‘The real Cesare is back,” a relieved friend said one night at Cesare Casella’s hotly awaited Salumeria Rosi Parmacotto. Earlier meals had been duds. The herbs for which the chef is famous — he wears rosemary in his shirt pocket! — were AWOL. Did he think Upper East Siders wouldn’t take to his true Tuscan style?

More recent visits brought forth a big “whew!” Good Italian cooking is scarce on Madison Avenue, home to notoriously overpriced Nello. This winning, three-times-larger and classier edition of Casella’s cramped Upper West Side original, Salumeria Rosi, is the game-changer. It’s expensive (pasta $19 to $24, mains mostly in the $30s), but what do you expect?

The Lucca-born chef has been a prime mover on the Italian scene since the early 1990s, when he ran kitchens in the Pino Luongo empire’s glory days. His Tuscan envelope-stretching later reached its apex at Beppe, where pan-Mediterranean and North African flavors made the cuisine new.

Casella rebounded from his sloppy Tuscan-Texan fling Maremma with Salumeria on Amsterdam Avenue. The East Side sequel is also a partnership with Italy’s salumeria specialist Grupo Parmacotto; like the first, it’s fronted by a retail counter glistening with cured meats, cheese and fancy regional items.

From the sidewalk, it doesn’t look like a restaurant at all. But the narrow counter zone flows into wider, red-and-cream dining rooms conjured by Hollywood set designer Dante Ferretti. They’re spacious but clubby, wrapped in “ancient Roman” murals cheerier than the ones in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A long rear mirror flatters inventively tinted blondes and doting men who peruse a grand wine list, guided by savvy sommelier Michael Doctor. Months of hype about the place omitted an important fact: There’s no full bar because, under antiquated city rules, the restaurant is too close to a church.

Early visits made me fear that Casella believed Ralph Lauren shoppers wanted WASP-y Italian. Bass acqua pazza was “good for a diet but not much else,” a friend grumbled. Couscous seafood in a tagine seemed tapered to convalescent taste.

Even then, hints of glory emerged, like a heart-stoppingly rich, sauteed chicken liver on Tuscan toast. Now, Casella’s conviction is back.

It surged through savarin del parmacotto, a $23 starter. Risotto boiled and baked to a nubbly consistency is inserted into a doughnut-shape skin of cooked prosciutto so membrane-thin, it’s barely perceptible. The doughnut hole is filled with rich tomato sauce and tiny meatballs — a composition at once rustic and elegant.

The menu breaks no new ground but works the known earth/territory well. Acqua pazza came alive with John Dory and light broth humming a ginger-and-thyme tune. Squid ink risotto tasted as sensuous as the plump specimen looked amid a sea of seppia-blackened Carnaroli rice.

There are even a few bargains. A $17 antipasto, sgombro (mackerel), turned out to be nearly secondi-size, the fish in deep-green dandelion puree and chickpeas. Orecchiette, sausage and broccoli rabe ($21) sounded plain-vanilla predictable, yet was so fervently pulled together it seemed a revelation.

Artfully tweaked traditional desserts, including gianduja and panna cotta, were swell. Rum raisin gelato might be the best in my lifetime of rum raisin-wrangling.

Even so, Salumeria II has kinks in its system. Waiters talk too much: Just take our order, please. And encountering a scissors-sharp, half-inch-long rosemary sprig inside an innocent pork-and-beef raviolo made me call for the boss.

An alarmed-sounding Casella apologized: “That’s not supposed to be in there.” He headed for the kitchen where we imagined a cook being put through the mandoline.

Salumeria is a good Italian restaurant. It ought to be great. Keep reminding your team, Cesare, they’re cooking not for Madison Avenue — but for Manhattan.