IT’S the killer comfort cuisine for bad times. It tastes better than any other kind of comparably priced food. Whatever the reason, the mind-boggling Italian restaurant invasione is this year’s biggest dining-out news. And you thought it was Vietnamese sandwiches!
You wouldn’t know it from food media consumed with the banh mi “boom,” but the real frenzy is the unprecedented Italian push into both new, high-profile addresses and locations where other cuisines flopped.
This fall, the Modern-American restaurant at 390 Park Ave., formerly known as Lever House, will reopen as Casa Lever, an Italian eatery that aims to combine fine dining by night with “power” lunching by day.
It might or might not be run by the people behind Madison Avenue’s Sant Ambroeus, an online buzz that landlord Aby Rosen won’t confirm. But it’s definitely Italian, our insiders say, and hopes to bring in a Sirio Maccioni-style ringmaster to compete with the Four Seasons across the street.
Casa Lever is just the tip of the tagliatelle. It will be one of three, ultra-high-profile locations where the Boot’s bounty will replace a different kind of cuisine this autumn.
A Voce, a new edition of the popular East 26th Street original, will move into Time Warner Center’s former Café Gray space, and an as-yet-untitled Danny Meyer Italian eatery will take over Gramercy Park Hotel’s dining room that was Chinese Wakiya.
True, the Italian scene lost an important place this year: Fiamma on Spring Street. That lone shutdown must be weighed against four ambitious, recent or imminent openings at venues where no restaurants previously existed — Montenapo in the New York Times building, Armani Ristorante on Fifth Avenue, San Domenico sequel SD-26 in September on Madison Square Park, and South Beach satellite Quattro this fall in the Trump Soho Hotel.
These days, when an Italian spot fails or moves, it’s almost invariably followed by another Italian. Spectacular Marea succeeded San Domenico on Central Park South. Locande de Verde with Andrew Carmellini at the helm replaced hapless Ago in the Greenwich Hotel, and Caravaggio is coming to the old Coco Pazzo space on East 74th Street.
More provocative is the murderers’ row of Italian joints that are ousting or succeeding non-Italian ones. The scorched-earth conquest started a few months ago when Roman-inspired Sora Lella moved into what had been Argentine Lomito on Varick Street. A third outpost of Nino’s replaced Indian flop Ada on East 58th. Quinto Quarto took over the longtime A.O.C. Bedford space in the West Village.
Even once-African Merkato 55 in the Meatpacking District sneakily turned Italian with a pasta-heavy menu, although how long the bizarre Boot-ification will last is unclear; it’s in bankruptcy and no one there could confirm what’s going on.
Harry’s Italian, run by FiDi restaurant king Peter Poulakakos, will soon move into what was Gold Street. Accademia di Vino is replacing seafood house Docks on upper Broadway this summer.
Besides Meyer’s Gramercy Park Hotel launch, it’s worth noting that his Union Square Cafe, long regarded as the city’s most popular restaurant, has added so many Italian dishes under new chef Carmen Quagliata that Time Out New York’s Jay Cheshes called it a “stealth trattoria.”
What’s up, Danny? “Italian food has certainly always been my comfort food for all times,” Meyer says.
“There’s little that makes me feel better than a really good bowl of pasta with tomato sauce. It’s a cuisine that people seem to love eating over and over, and so it lends itself to a restaurant which aims to earn a loyal, repeat clientele.”
Meyer might be overplaying it; Quagliata’s creations like capellini with flaked halibut, broccoli rabe and white wine are anything but Carmine’s-like. But pasta power thrives at all the new Italians — even at Marea, whose name means “tide” and which is mostly about seafood.
Italian cuisine is about much more than pasta, of course. The just-opened and planned new places run the regional gamut from the Austrian- and German-influenced north to the Arab- and Greek-complexioned south. But the insatiable craving for what many older Italian-Americans still call “macaroni” might pose a credible threat to the world’s durum wheat reserves.
It’s no surprise at a time when the rotten economy and vanished party business have restaurateurs scrambling to survive. Thanks to how cheap pasta is for a kitchen to buy or make, it’s easy on their bottom lines. Italian scene veteran Lello Arpaia, who owns Fiorini on East 56th Street, says that on average, pasta, whether house-made or dry, “costs us no more than 20 to 25 percent of what we sell it for, compared with 34 to 35 percent for meat and fish.”
Someday it will be the turn of French or Japanese or Chinese food to kick Italian cuisine to the curb. But for the time being, there’s no sign of New Yorkers saying basta to pasta — or of restaurants throwing out branzino for banh mi.
scuozzo@nypost.com