Lamb Dinner at Roberta’s

Until a few weeks ago, I figured I’d never make it to Roberta’s, Bushwick’s little pizzeria that could. Sam Sifton gave it two stars, and everything I’d read suggested he was right.

But Roberta’s had conditions I was unwilling to live with: a trip to a neighborhood where there is nothing else of interest to me, for a likely one to two-hour wait at most normal times. Reservations are accepted only for an acclaimed tasting menu (served on uncomfortable benches) that’s offered to just eight people a week.

I was eager, but not that eager.

Then Roberta’s launched a series of theme dinners, one per month over the summer, starting with lamb. Served in the outdoor garden, these are open to about 35 people, with tickets sold online. (Click on the image for a larger copy of the menu.)

Just like a concert, you’ve got to be really sure you can make the date, but the price was remarkable: $95 per person including service, tax and tip, for five courses plus paired wines.

I’ll cut to the chase: the food and service were exceptional for the price. I still wouldn’t trundle out here without a reservation. With one, it was a most enjoyable evening.

We arrived a bit early and had drinks in the outdoor Tiki Bar (above).

The outdoor garden (above left) is a post-industrial junkyard, scattered with planters (above right). You’re led to believe that the chef is growing his own produce, but is he? Given the volume at Roberta’s, could such a small garden really supply much more than just a minimal amount of what they consume?

It poured for most of the day. Had the weather not cleared up, dinner would have moved inside to Blanca, the new event space next door, which could be the sign of where Roberta’s is headed. There’s a restroom in there with a fancy heated toilet seat, and a sleek, modern kitchen, and counter seating on plush bar stools. It’s everything the original Roberta’s is not.

I asked about the use of that space. “It’s all part of the Roberta’s empire,” a server said.

Anyhow, the rain abated, so they stuck to the original plan. Dinner was served in an outdoor tent, with two long tables, wooden benches, and burlap taking the place of placemats. Chef de cuisine Max Sussman (above left) cooked in an outdoor oven while legs of lamb twirled on a spit, and another cook worked in a smaller tent nearby (above right).

The food was all very good. We started with Pea Soup (above right) with morels and sunflower oil.

Then came breaded Lamb’s Tongue (above left) with watercress, locust flower, and capra sarda (a goat cheese) and a Garden Salad (above right) with aged gouda, radish, and snap peas.

Lamb Shank (above left) with yogurt and pickled ramps was a bit of a letdown. But Leg of Lamb (above right), served family-style, had a rich, smokey flavor imparted from the roasting spit, with roasted poatoes, broccoli rabe, and garlic flatbread (below left).

Dessert, a cucumber mint gelato (above right) was just fine, but seemed phoned in.

The beverages included five wines of the sort you might choose for a summer patio dinner: none great, but all good enough for the occasion. For the price I cannot complain, especially as the pours were unlimited.

This wasn’t a typical Roberta’s dinner, but it certainly conveyed a feel for what all the fuss has been about. The food and service were great, but dinner ended past 10:00pm, and the subway ride home took an hour and a half.

“Next time, we need to order a car service,” my girlfriend said.

Roberta’s (261 Moore Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn)

Food: Rustic Italian-American cuisine
Service: Not fancy, but attentive
Ambiance: A post-industrial junkyard

Rating: ★★
Why? It’s a pain to get here, but there’s nothing quite like it in New York

Union Square Cafe

Note: In late 2015, Union Square Cafe closed at its original location, due to a rent hike. It is expected to re-open a few blocks away in spring 2016, in the former City Crab space.

*

Has it really been 20 years since I visited Union Square Cafe? I’ve a vague memory of lunch there, about that long ago. It’s been on my revisit list since forever, but was never readily bookable at times I wanted to go.

Reservations have loosened up a bit: recently, I was able to book midweek at 6:45pm on ten days’ notice. I don’t recall ever being able to do that.

You really do need to try Union Square Cafe. On any fair reckoning, it is one of the most influential New York restaurants of the last quarter-century. If it had accomplished nothing else, it would deserve a place in the pantheon for launching the career of restaurateur Danny Meyer, who was 27 when it opened in 1985.

There were stumbles then: a one-star review from Bryan Miller in 1986. Meyer persisted, replacing the opening chef (Ali Barker) with Michael Romano, winning three stars from Miller in 1989. By 1999, William Grimes re-affirmed three stars, noting that although the place was still “hugely popular…It’s not the food that’s setting off the stampede.”

When Union Square opened, it was one of the first, and the best, of a new breed that Bryan Miller called ”international bistro,” in reviewing the restaurant in 1989 in The New York Times and awarding it three stars.

Union Square has not changed, but the world has changed around it. Michael Romano, the executive chef and part owner, does what he has always done, and done very well, which is to turn out jazzed-up bistro and trattoria fare with utter consistency. What looked like a flashy sports car a decade ago now seems more like a midsize Buick cruising in the center lane at a precise 65.

Ten years later Frank Bruni knocked it down to two stars. There were too many blunders; the food wasn’t consistent enough. But he still found, as one does at every Danny Meyer restaurant, “staff so seemingly genuine in their yearning to accommodate you and their contrition when they can’t that Danny Meyer…must be giving them either Method acting classes or major pharmaceuticals. Maybe both.”

It would be foolish to expect Union Square Cafe to change very much. At some point, a pathbreaking restaurant becomes a tradition in itself. This restaurant has earned that.

It could still clean up its act. I don’t know many places that serve a $13.50 cocktail, with a straw still in its sealed paper sheath. A restaurant of this caliber shouldn’t be serving any accessory in its factory wrapper. When I ordered a glass of wine to follow up, the server failed to bring it, because she didn’t notice I’d finished that cocktail, even though considerable time went by.

We ordered two appetizers to share; only one came. Realizing their mistake, the staff served the second appetizer with the entrées. (To be fair, it was taken off the bill without prompting.)

The cuisine is difficult to classify. The website calls it “American … with an Italian soul, using fresh ingredients from the local Greenmarket.” Miller’s first three-star review called it “Northern Italian” cusine, flat out.

Over the years, the Italian influence has mellowed, aside from the pasta section of the menu. Most of the appetizers and main courses could be found in any seasonal American restaurant, though descriptive Italian words pop up here and there. In the service and ambiance, Union Square Cafe doesn’t resemble an Italian restaurant at all.

Prices are not expensive, for a restaurant that had three stars until quite recently. Snacks are $4–7, appetizers $10–19, pastas $16–19 (small portion) or $26–29 (large), entrées $27–35, side dishes $8–10. I’d call that the “upper middle” price range for Manhattan. The menu changes daily, and the website (every time I checked) displayed a current one.

Appetizers were weaker than the main courses. Asparagus Tempura ($19; above left) sounded like a good idea, but when you throw in lobster, seared pork belly, and ramp vinaigrette, it’s at least one ingredient too many. The asparagus were good, but the lobster was slightly rubbery, the pork belly a bit chalky.

From the snacks portion of the menu, we ordered the Pig Ears ($6; above right) as our second appetizer. This was the item that didn’t come out on time. I liked the tarragon mustard, but the ears themselves were in a cloying sauce that tasted like soy. We didn’t bother to finish them.

I was impressed with both entrées. Pork shoulder ($27; above left) was in a honey-balsamic glaze, with ramp polenta and spring slaw. I’m not positive what accompanied the Trout ($27; above right), as the online menu has since changed, but the fish itself was lovely.

The beverage list runs to 33 pages; wines are mostly French, Italian, and American, priced from the mid-$40s to the thousands. There is something here for almost every budget.

The attractive tri-level space would be considered a bit old-fashioned if it opened today, but I doubt there are any complaints from the clientele, which skews slightly older than average. There is a younger crowd at the bar, where a full menu is available. The décor deftly straddles the line between formal and casual. Whether it’s a special occasion or an average night out, you can feel at home.

The service, so eager to please, fumbles at times — or did on this particular night — but Union Square Cafe remains worthwhile, and could still teach its many imitators a thing or two.

Union Square Cafe (21 E. 16th St. between Broadway & Fifth Ave., Union Square)

Food: American Greenmarket with Italian influences, mostly very good
Service: As accommodating as can be, if a bit sloppy at times
Ambiance: A civilized, adult restaurant; would that there were more of them.

Rating: ★★
Why? Still one of the best of its kind, after all these years

Corsino

Corsino never made it to the top of my review list when it opened in late 2009. I was put off by the repetitiveness of the Denton brothers’ restaurant proffer: all they seemed to do was clone their original casual Italian spot, ’inoteca, with minor tweaks from one installation to the next. (An attempt at upscale Italian, Bar Milano, was a spectacular flame-out.)

In the meantime, the brothers split up recently, with Jason buying out Joe, who has moved to Australia.

Corsino sits on an ideal West Village street corner, with big glass windows on two sides letting in plenty of sunlight. The casual rustic décor is right out of the Dentons’ playbook.

The menu is a lineup of “the usual suspects,” with a few twists for the more adventurous, such as: tripe soup; oxtail ravioli with bitter chocolate; heritage brisket meatballs.

Prices are inexpensive, with crostini $2.50 apiece, antipasti $5–13, pastas $15–18, entrées $15–21, sides $7–9. The antipasti and pastas looked a lot more interesting, so we ordered only from those categories.

Affetatti (sliced meats) are $10 individually, but for $18 you get an impressive spread of testa (pig’s head), lingua (tongue), soppressata, prosciutto, mortadella, and speck.

 

The pastas were exemplary: strascinati (above left) with pork shoulder, pecorino & nutmeg; and clever special of buckwheat ravioli filled with spinach, decorated with flower petals (above right).

The wine list, too, is far better than you’d expect: eight pages, all Italian, grouped by region. You could spend hundreds, but there’s an ample selection below $40—as there should be (ahem: Gabe Stulman). Service was attentive, but our visit early on a slow Sunday evening, with the restaurant less than half full, may not be typical.

It’s hard to call Corsino a destination, when so many neighborhoods have Italian food of this quality, but it is certainly enjoyable here (especially when it’s not busy), and the wine list will reward repeat visits.

Corsino (637 Hudson Street at Horatio Street, West Village)

Food: good, seasona, casual, Italian
Service: friendly and attentive
Ambiance: cookie-cutter rustic chic

Rating: ★
Why? The food is pretty good and the wine list is even better

The Bread Man at Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria

In Pete Wells’s ecstatic three-star review of Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria, he was rapturous about the bread:

Is it … logical to fall for a restaurant because of sliced bread in a basket? It was remarkable stuff, with the gradually unfolding nuances of taste that are achieved only through a slow and patient fermentation of dough with wild yeast.

In my own review, I was respectful but far less excited:

The bread service is pretty good, but not quite deserving of critic Wells’s near-orgasmic description. It’s made in in-house and a tad fresher than you’ll get most places, but hardly anything to change your life.

This led to an email from Kamel Saci, the head bread baker at Il Buco A&V. From the photo in my review, he inferred I’d been served the ciabatta, a “very good” but “simple” example of his work, and asked if I’d revisit the restaurant for a “bread tasting.”

Mr. Saci works from 3:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., so we agreed I would drop in on a Saturday at about noon, near the end of his shift.

I little reckoned what I was in for. After I arrived, Mr. Saci emerged from the restaurant’s basement with a huge box, about twenty inches square, and led me to the second-floor dining room (which is unused during the day). The box contained about a dozen loaves of bread, all in different flavors and styles.

 

Over the next half-hour or so, Mr. Saci patiently cut a half-slice of bread from each loaf, delivering a mini-lecture on how it is made. My favorites were the parmigiana reggiano, black & green olive, and walnut & raisin breads, but this is without disparagement to the others, nearly all of which were very good. (There were one or two not to my liking, but it would be silly to complain when there are a dozen to choose from.)

Mr. Saci says that nowhere in town, outside of wholesale bakeries, makes so many different kinds of bread in house. I have no reason to doubt this. Even at restaurants reknowned for their bread service (Bouley, for example), I’ve never seen more than five or six choices at any given time.

But most of the breads I tried are not offered to the dinner guest. This is the drawback of a restaurant that doubles as a grocery, and wasn’t prepared to be quite as popular as it has become. By dinner time, the more interesting breads are gone. I had a fascinating lesson in the science of bread-baking, but most people couldn’t duplicate my experience.

 

After our tasting was over, Mr. Saci took me down two flights of stairs into the sub-basement, where there is a prep kitchen (above left) and the bread ovens (above right). The dough at Il Buco A&V is house-made and fermented with a natural leaven (not yeast), a process that takes 24 to 36 hours. He would prefer 48 hours, but I gather the cooler where the bread cures overnight (below left) doesn’t have enough space for that.

A circuitous route brought Mr. Saci, a French native, to Il Buco A&V. After several years on the ultimate fighting circuit, he took up baking in 1999. After training in Bordeaux, he eventually moved to London, where he supplied the breads for Pierre Gagnaire and Joël Robuchon. He then moved to Barcelona to open “the best bakery in Spain,” and in 2009 to a wholesale bakery in Miami, before coming to New York in 2011 to open Il Buco A&V.

  

After our tasting was over, Mr. Saci sent me home with about 10 pounds of bread, which we enjoyed over the next several days. Needless to say, we could not finish all of it. Several loaves are now in the freezer, which would probably make Mr. Saci cringe.

So, there are very good things, great things, going on in Il Buco A&V’s subterranean bakery. But it’s a pity that so little is left by dinner time.

Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria (53 Great Jones Street west of Bowery, NoHo)

Fiorini

   

Among families in the restaurant business, it is hard to find a starker contrast than the Arpaias: the under-publicized Lello; and his glamorous, photogenic daughter Donatella, who is often in the news, a fixture on the Food Network, and is seldom out of mind at her restaurants—because most of them are named after her.

But we never would’ve heard of Donatella, had it not been for her father, who has quietly put together a four-decade career at a series of upscale, old-school, classic Italian restaurants. He has closed a few, but they’ve all had multi-year runs, mostly successful, and without an outright failure. His current flagship is Fiorini, named for a monetary unit in nineteenth-century Tuscany. (Another Arpaia, Donatella’s older brother Dino, runs nearby Cellini.)

The few professional reviews of Fiorini are overly fixated on price. New York says it’s “Italian…aimed at the expense-account set.” Time Out says it’s “a neighborhood restaurant in a neighborhood with money to burn,” with “steep prices.” Menupages gives it five dollar signs ($$$$$), the same as Per Se. Zagat says “it’s ‘on the short list’ for ‘adult’ locals who don’t mind that checks are ‘a bit steep.’”

Time for a reality check. Antipasti and salads at Fiorini are $9–14, pastas $19–23, entrées mostly $24–30 (only two veal dishes surpass that amount). That’s about the same as you’ll pay at the city’s better known two-star Italian restaurants, such as Peasant, Locanda Verde, or Spigolo (to name a few), and no one has ever referred to those establishments as expense-account places.

And of course, you can easily pay far more than that for Italian cuisine in NYC, including some restaurants that are worth it (like Del Posto or Marea), and many that are not (like Nello or Harry Cipriani).

I would classify Fiorini as a bargain, assuming you’re in the market for what Mr. Arpaia is selling: very good traditional Italian cuisine in a comfortable, elegant, but slightly old-fashioned midtown dining room. This, to be fair, is a product that most of the city’s professional critics do not care for, which is why the prices grab their attention, when at any number of identically priced but more fashionable restaurants, they do not.

Full disclosure: I dined at Fiorini at the publicist’s invitation and did not pay for my meal. The kitchen sent out a nine-course “tasting menu”—a format the restaurant does not normally offer—consisting mostly of smaller-sized portions of dishes from their regular menu.

 

1. Polpo Ai Ferri (above left; grilled Mediterranean octopus, tomato, caper berries, olives, arugula, red onions). This was one of the better octopus dishes I’ve had in a while.

2. Burrata (above right; creamy imported mozzarella, roasted peppers, asparagus, prosciutto di Parma). This was some of the softest, sweetest burrata around, and I liked the textural contrast with the prosciutto.

 

3. Bucatini alla Matriciana (above left; San Marzano tomato sauce, imported pancetta, onions, Pecorino Romano).

4. Risotto ai Frutti di Mare (above right; Super fino arborio rice, jumbo lump crabmeat, diver scallops, ocean shrimp, calamari, seafood broth).

The reduced portion size didn’t quite do the two pasta/rice dishes justice; in particular, I couldn’t really make out all of the ingredients in the risotto, though the bucatini were pretty good.

 

5. Pesce Spada Livornese (above left; grilled swordfish, imported olives, onions, capers, and tomato sauce). The swordfish had a terrific smoky flavor, but in the smaller portion size was a bit too dry.

6. Cappesante (above right; pan-seared diver scallops, caper berries, lemon, white wine, fresh parsley). This was the best of the savory courses, aided by the plump, juicy scallop, with wonderful contrast from the caper berries and a candied apricot on the side.

7. Petto D’Anatra (below left; pan-seared duck breast with Bartlett poached pears in a dry vermouth sauce). This was a beautiful, rich portion of duck, though the sauce was not as memorable as the one given the scallop.

 

8. Zucotto (above right; three chocolate and passion-fruit mousse cake).

9. Baba (below left; sponge cake, hint of rum, Marsala wine, Mascarpone cheese custard).

10. Plate of Biscotti (below right).

The desserts were exemplary (and were served in full-size portions). I especially liked the Zucotto. I haven’t many examples for comparison, but I finished all of it despite not being a chocolate lover. The Baba was just fine, but it’s hard to avoid comparisons with Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, where they brought around a cart with a dozen aged rums to choose from. It’s no fault of Mr. Arpaia that Fiorini can’t duplicate this. Here, they supply the rum on the side, and you decide how much to add: I poured in the whole glass, unapologetically.

 

As I have noted in past reviews, old-school upscale Italian is the most over-represented cuisine in the city. Even if this were not an invited review (with all of the freighted conflicts it brings), it would be difficult to articulate precisely how this restaurant sets itself apart from others of comparable quality. I’d need to spend a month eating Italian every night, before I could tell you that, so I’ll leave you with the following:

A meal here may give the impression of a trip in the wayback machine, given the trends in contemporary dining. But for old-fashioned Italian elegance there are few better than Lello Arpaia.

Fiorini (209 East 56th Street between Second & Third Avenues, East Midtown)

Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria

 

Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria (“IBA”) doesn’t deserve the three stars Pete Wells of The New York Times gave it a fortnight ago, but you already knew that. It just might be the single craziest Times review of the last decade—and there have been some howlers, believe me.

What’s sad is not that IBA is overrated. What’s sad is that a good, earnest “neighborhood-plus” restaurant is now getting hammered with crowds it cannot handle, who arrive with expectations it cannot possibly meet.

Of course, it is also sad that the Paper of Record thinks believes IBA is in any respect comparable to Babbo or Marea, Italian restaurants with three deserved stars; or that it is in any respect superior to Lincoln, which has just two; or Osteria Morini, which has one.

This is not to take anything away from what owner Donna Lennard has done, which is to create a cute Italian market (an alimentari) with a pretty good sandwich shop by day (when they don’t run out of stuff—which seems to happen a lot), and an endearing (if crazily crowded) Trattoria by night.

The market came first: they sell cheeses, salumi, olive oil, chocolates, and the like. Then came the restaurant. It was clearly part of the plan all along: there is a bright, open kitchen in the back, and there are two bars. But stools and tables (several of them communal), surely as many as the law allows, have now been crammed into almost every nook and cranny. Plan on getting to know your neighbor really, really well.

It’s a three-meal-a-day operation, and the market remains open all the while. Kim Davis of The Times says serve the best porchetta sandwich in town. But presumably it’s mainly the dinner menu that got them three stars. (Click on the photo, above left, for a larger image.)

It’s heavy on appetizers (an even dozen of them, $12–18), pastas (a half-dozen, $17–21) and salumi (various prices; assortment for $32). There are just four secondi ($29–38)—and one of those, the spit-roasted short ribs ($38), is actually an order for two, though the menu fails to so state.

The bread service (above right) is pretty good, but not quite deserving of critic Wells’s near-orgasmic description. It’s made in in-house and a tad fresher than you’ll get most places, but hardly anything to change your life. I was actually a bit more addicted to the bread sticks. [Addendum: After I wrote this, the head baker asked me to come in for a bread tasting, where I had quite a bit more than the simple ciabatta shown here.]

 

House-cured salt cod fritters ($12; above left) are a decent snack; certainly a few steps better than Mrs. Paul’s.

I had set my hopes on the aforementioned short ribs (above right), not realizing that it was a dish for two. Plenty of restaurants would charge the same ($38) for a solo portion, so after being properly warned by the server, I went ahead and ordered it anyway. It’s the whole short rib, tender and luscious, with a garnish of olives, celery, walnuts, and horseradish, and—so says The Times—peppercorns and coriander seeds. It is awfully salty. That, more than the size of the portion, is why I stopped eating it halfway through.

 

On a second visit, I tried the Fried Rabbit ($15; above left). A leg, thigh, and “wing” are coated in an appealing bread crust with black pepper, honey, and lemon. Paccheri ($21; above right), with braised oxtail, greens, and parmigiano, was far less impressive. The pasta was too chewy and not warm enough.

IBA’s sister restaurant, just-plain Il Buco, to which I haven’t been, opened nearby in 1994. It received one star from Ruth Reichl—which in those days was a compliment. The food boards say that the dishes in common are a bit better at IBA, but the original looks like a more charming space: it doesn’t double as a grocery, and they haven’t shoehorned in quite so many tables per square foot.

The service is better than you’d expect: they take reservations (good luck getting one right now), check coats, and seat incomplete parties. I walked in on a Wednesday evening at around 5:45 p.m., fifteen minutes before dinner service, and was seated at the bar as soon as the dining room opened. The following Monday at 6:00 on the dot was also just fine. Both times, less than an hour later, it was packed. It is all they can do to keep up, but I hesitate to blame them: I doubt even they thought they were building a three-star restaurant.

Pete Wells said that IBA reminded him of a mythical Italian village. To me, it felt like an obvious product of Manhattan, not that that’s surprising: most Manhattan restaurants do; funny how that works. A diner asked to order appetizers, and he’d see about primi or secondi later on. “I’m sorry,” the server replied, “but Chef prefers to receive your entire order at once.” Try and find an Italian restaurant in Umbria where they’d say that.

The wine list, which fits on one sheet of paper, is limited to about eight producers (not all of them Italian), with half-a-dozen wines from each of them. Prices by the glass are reasonable (disclosure: one was comped), but the bartenders don’t offer you a taste before pouring.

With its extensive in-house baking and curing program, IBA clearly has more going for it than your average neighborhood Italian place. For now, it is a destination restaurant, and as the owners have been around for nearly two decades, you can figure they’re here to stay. But just like Eataly, a space that is trying to be both a grocery and a restaurant is not ideal at either one.

Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria (53 Great Jones Street west of Bowery, NoHo)

Food: Enjoyable but uneven and over-priced modern Italian cuisine
Service: Hectic
Ambiance: A market and a restaurant combined, to the detriment of both

Rating: ★
Why? Compelling at times, but too flawed and uneven to be a critic’s pick

Morso

It took a while to remember when I had been here before: the large, luxurious restaurant space at the base of an apartment building in Sutton Place. It was Savonara, a terrific Turkish restaurant that closed three years ago, before anyone (but me) could review it.

The Palace, Bouterin, and Sandro’s, are among the others who have occupied that fated space, and failed.

Now comes Morso (Italian for “small bites”) from the well-traveled chef, Pino Luongo. I’ve never been to his other places, such as Le Madri, Coco Pazzo, Tuscan Square, or Centolire. Most of them are long since closed. Centolire is still open, except when it’s seized.

Luongo is not shy about slamming other chefs, whether it’s Michael White, Andrew Carmellini, or Mario Batali: none can please him. Perhaps he had better worry about drawing crowds to Morso. A recent weeknight visit found the space more than half empty. Those it did attract were mostly over fifty.

It’s a nice-looking place, with the walls decked out in vintage 1960s European poster art. And three cheers for Luongo for putting out tablecloths and not drowning out diners with the sound system. You can have a comfortable, civilized meal, in a pretty room unlike any other you’ve seen, and you won’t need to shout to be heard. Why can’t we have more restaurants like that?

But Luongo went to a lot of trouble (and expense) to create a restaurant very few people will see. No one draws a destination crowd to this neighborhood in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. It’s a looooong hike from transit, the area (though safe) is unfashionable, and there are a lot of seats to fill.

There are two central conceits to the menu. Most of the selections are available in two sizes, morso (a smaller plate) or tutto (larger). They’re organized by main ingredient (vegetables, eggs & cheese, poultry, etc.), rather than the standard appetizer–pasta–entrée arrangement, so there is considerable flexibility in the way you organize a meal.

The morso plates are $10–24 (most $18 or less), the tutto plates $19–30. Where a dish is available both ways, there’s generally about $5–8 separating the two sizes. There are about a half-dozen items only available in the larger size, and these range from $26 (pork chop) to $58 (ribeye steak).

It’s a structure that lends itself to over-ordering and upselling, but our server was remarkably restrained, advising us that two morsos was enough. 

The appetizers were more successful than the entrées. My friend liked the Carciofi ($14; above left), a crispy artichoke salad with pickled fennel, olives, arugula, and citrus dressing.

And I adored the Uova ($14; above right), a soft poached egg with lamb sausage, chickpea fries, and a fontina cheese sauce. Puncture the egg and mop it up with the fries, and you have an instant classic.

The Maiale ($26; above left), or pork chop, looked promising: it’s a large hunk of meat wrapped in bacon, served with butternut squash gratin and winter greens in an apple-sage sauce, but the pork was slightly over-cooked.

Housemade Pappardelle ($16; above center) came with a brisket pot roast and a porcini mushroom sauce, but a large hunk of (concededly tender) pot roast on the side wasn’t well integrated into the rest of the dish. A side order of roasted Brussels Sprouts ($8; above right) was competently done.

I especially like the morso/tutto option on so many of the dishes. If I lived in the neighborhood, I would love having a place like this to drop in for something light, at times that I’m not in the mood for a big meal. And our meal was comparatively inexpensive, at around $125 (including drinks) before tax and tip.

But as I’ve noted in the past, mid-level Italian is the most over-saturated cuisine in New York. The chef is awfully impressed with himself, but hasn’t noted that food of this quality—or better—is available all over town.

Morso (420 E. 59th Street between First and York Avenues, Sutton Place)

Food: *
Service: **
Ambiance: **
Overall: *½

Uva Restaurant and Wine Bar

I am leery of accepting dinner invitations from publicists, as it’s sometimes a signal that the restaurant is desperate.

At Uva Restaurant and Wine Bar, it is entirely the opposite. On a Wednesday evening, the charming, rustic space was bustling, full of the young, energetic, value-conscious diners that most people think the Upper East Side doesn’t have.

After it opened in 2005, Uva received just one professional review that I can find, a mostly favorable write-up from The Times in $25 & Under. It has received little media attention since then. Our visit was at the publicist’s invitation, and all of the usual caveats apply. However, between the four of us we were able to sample a good deal of the menu, and my friends didn’t hesitate to share their critical reactions, both positive and negative.

Uva is owned by the Lusardi family, whose sister restaurant down the block, Lusardi’s, serves a very similar Northern Italian menu in considerably more upscale surroundings. To the younger crowd that favors Uva, Lusardi’s is the old-fashioned white-tablecloth place where they’d take the grandparents. My age is about midway between most of Uva’s patrons and grandpa, and perhaps I’d probably enjoy the higher-priced (but much quieter) Lusardi’s a bit more. Uva is more cozy: with low ceilings and exposed brick right out of the downtown playbook, it does get loud in there.

But Uva has its charms, with 40 wines by the glass, most of them $12.50 or less; and 250 wines by the bottle in a wide range from $28 to a few reserve selections in three and four figures. (I assume Uva shares stock with Lusardi’s, which has a 500-bottle list.)

Although Uva is marketed as a wine bar, it has a full menu of antipasti, cheeses, pastas, and entrées. Portions are ample, and nothing costs more than $22. There is also a late-night menu from 11:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., a rarity in this neighborhood.

Chisolino ($9.50; above left) is a dish I’ve not had before, an Emilian-style focaccia with Robiola cheese and preserved black truffles. This was one of the more satisfying and memorable dishes of the evening.

Of the two bruschette we tried (both $6.50), our table voted a slight preference for the Sundried Tomato Puree, Pesto & Pine Nuts (above left) over the Wild Mushrooms, Arugula & Parmigiano Cheese (above right).

The appetizer course was the evening’s best, with a quartet of excellent dishes:

1. Insalata di Barbabietole ($9; above left), a salad of red beets, goat cheese and fava bean salad. Some version of this dish seems to appear in every restaurant, but this was a fine rendition of it.

2. Involtini de Melanzane ($10; above right), eggplant stuffed with ricotta and spinach, baked in a pink sauce with mozzarela. This is a dish I’ve not seen before, and frankly one of the few eggplant dishes I have ever liked.

3. Polenta Tartufata ($9; above left), fresh polenta filled with robiola cheese in a black truffle sauce. This was probably my favorite dish of the evening, and like the stuffed eggplant, I haven’t seen anything quite resembling it before.

4. Burrata Barese ($13; above right), creamy mozzarella with yellow beef tomatoes, fava beans, and a balsamic glaze.

The pasta course (right) was competently executed, but less distinctive:

1. Gnocchi di Ricotta ($18), home made ricotta gnocchi in a creamy black truffle and chive sauce. (Truffles seem to figure in a lot of the dishes here.)

2. Pappardelle al Ragu di Vitelo ($17), house-made pasta ribbons sautéed with ragout of veal and montasio cheese.

3. Cavatelli al Pesto ($18), house-made pasta shells in a creamy pesto sauce with shaved ricotta.

All three were acceptable, but the sense of the table was that we’d had better versions of them elsewhere.

The entrées were all quite heavy, plated and sauced in a style that isn’t fashionable these days. Three of the four seemed to be swimming in the identical dark brown sauce, which was too much of a good thing.

Anello de Capesante e Speck ($22; above left), was the most striking of these dishes, with five scallops arranged in a pentagon held together with a string of smoked prosciutto, resting in sautéed spinach and a white wine sauce. The whole production had a rich, dusky flavor.

Polpaccio d’Agnello ($21; above right), a braised lamb shank, seemed (like most of the entrées) over-sauced.

Vitello Gratinato con Melanzane ($22; above left), veal topped with eggplant and soft pecorino cheese in a rosemary sauce, was a higher quality and more tender veal than the pounded-into-dust versions served at lesser restaurants.

Petto d’Anatra ($22; above right), a pan-seared duck breast in a thyme sauce, was served with sautéed oyster mushrooms, spinach, and fingerling potatoes. Here, the suace was so overwhelming that it was hard to taste much of the duck at all.

All four desserts we tried were excellent:

1. Torta di Mandate ($8; above left), an almond tart served warm with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce.

2. Baci Perugina Mousse ($8.50; above right), a chocolate and hazelnut mousse topped with chocolate sauce and toasted hazelnuts.

3. Salame del Papa ($6.50; below left), a chocolate “salame” Venetian style.

4. Fragole con crema al mascarpone ($7.50; below right), fresh strawberries topped with mascarpone cream.

There wasn’t a dud among these, but if I must choose, the first two were more memorable.

To summarize, the starter and dessert courses were clear winners. The pastas were about typical of a good Italian restaurant in New York, while the entrées struck us as a tad old-fashioned and somewhat heavier than many diners are looking for these days. Having said that, they are certainly good for the neighborhood, especially at just $22, a good $4–5 less than many places would charge.

The service was excellent, as you’d expect at a pre-arranged meal, but if Uva is packed on a Wednesday in January after seven years in business, they are probably doing something right.

Uva (1486 Second Avenue between 77th & 78th Streets, Upper East Side)

Bigoli

Note: This is a review under chef Alex Stratta, who left the restaurant in March 2012 after Eater.com put the restaurant on “deathwatch.” In a rare admission, the owners actually thanked Eater for getting deathwatched: “It got our butts in gear and forced us to make changes more quickly.

But Deathwatch is not escaped so easily. The restaurant closed in October 2012.

*

Bigoli is the new Italian restaurant from Vegas transplant and Top Chef: Masters alum Alessandro (“Alex”) Stratta.

Stratta trained with Alain Ducasse and Daniel Boulud, and his first few restaurants were in the elaborate French mold: Mary Elaine’s at the Phoenician in Scottsdale, Renoir at the Mirage in Las Vegas, and Alex at the Wynn (since closed), which earned two Michelin stars. He followed that up with an Italian place, Stratta, also at the Wynn, with which he is no longer involved.

Bigoli is a serious, comfortable, and mostly enjoyable restaurant. It’s also a little disappointing.

Stratta told The Times that he “didn’t want to do fancy any more.” You can hardly blame him: the city’s critics are skeptical of fancy restaurants, and they usually hate imported chefs. A Michelin multi-star concept transplanted from Vegas would practically be begging to get panned, no matter how good it was.

But “unfancy” Italian is the most over-represented cuisine in New York City. Does Stratta have a point of view? The opening menu is completely anonymous. If I stripped off the logo and showed it to a dozen food-savvy New Yorkers, none would guess where it came from. No dish would leap off the page: “Oh my, who’s serving that?” You’ve seen it all before.

The only possibility Bigoli allows at the moment, is to prepare the food well, at a fair price, in a comfortable space. That it mostly does, but so do many of its competitors. Antipasti are $9–15, pastas $19–25, entrées $23–49. Except for the obligatory prime ribeye and rack of lamb, all the entres are under $30. A wood-burning oven features prominently in an open kitchen, but the current menu gives no indication of which dishes actually use that oven—not that this feature is at all unique these days.

The meal opens with a helping of thick bread, a pesto dipping sauce, and a selection of olives. A Burrata appetizer ($15; above right) was rather an odd grab bag, with a lonely eggplant crostino, a thin slice of prosciutto, and a few salad greens.

As my girlfriend noted, when you put Seared Sea Scallops ($28; above left) on the same plate with roasted cauliflower, pine nuts, raisins, and brown butter, good things are bound to happen. I could do without the schmear of what looks like baby food on the right side of the plate, but the taste I had of the scallops was excellent.

Braised meats are likewise sure-fire—here, Tuscan Veal ($26; above right) with tomatoes, Swiss chard and chickpeas.

The wine list is a starter set. The Torcicoda Primitivo 2004 seemed like a good buy at $50, but the server returned with a bottle of the 2009 and had no idea that it wasn’t what I ordered.

After I pointed this out, his absurd retort was: “Don’t worry. It’s fresher that way,” apparently unaware of the principle that older bottles are usually more desirable.

A manager appeared and offered to take the bottle back if I didn’t like it. It was decent enough for a 2009 (still priced at $50), and I kept it, though it’s not the bottle I would have chosen had it been listed as a 2009 on the printed list.

Aside from that, the service was friendly and attentive, but the food took quite a while to come out, even though it was not busy on a Wednesday evening. The restaurant is only a month old, and I suspect it will get better, but there is some work to do.

Bigoli occupies an historic townhouse on a West Village side street. Eater.com commenters hated the décor, but we rather liked it: I don’t think the photos do it justice. The banquettes are comfortable, and the tables don’t seem as tightly packed as they often are at such places.

The chef told The Times, “we’re coming here with an incredible level of humility. New Yorkers really know food but I’m hoping they’ll be kind and patient.” Unfortunately, New Yorkers aren’t known for patience. If Stratta has bigger and bolder ideas for the cuisine, I can’t imagine what he’s waiting for.

We found Bigoli comfortable and pleasant, and if the entrées weren’t especially memorable, they were at least well made. For that, I would go back again. But I think the chef needs to do more to make Bigoli stand out from the mine run of good Italian restaurants, of which the city has no shortage.

Bigoli (140 W. 13th Street between Sixth & Seventh Avenues, West Village)

Food: *
Service: ½
Ambiance: *½
Overall: *

Lincoln Ristorante

I’ve dined at Lincoln Ristorante several times since it opened a year ago. It is not my favorite Lincoln Center restaurant, but it is certainly the most convenient, and it is very good.

I just wish I liked it better. I want to like it better. People I respect like it better. But it usually leaves me wanting more.

Lincoln opened with the proverbial thud, getting lukewarm reviews from most of the city’s critics. I had a long list of complaints in my original review, and I stand by most of them. Lincoln is too corporate: it screams of design by committee. The room and the building are unattractive. These things are unfixable.

What Chef Jonathan Benno and Restaurant Director Paolo Novello have done, is to fix what they can. Lincoln is not bargain dining, but prices now are a shade lower. An expensive tasting menu and an absurd $130 ribeye are no longer offered. Portion sizes, which for some dishes were insultingly small, have been increased.

Benno has found his inside voice. Though I am not fond of the open kitchen, at least you no longer hear a drill sergeant commanding the Normandy invasion. We sat right next to the glass partition at dinner a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t think we heard him once. What a relief!

Service, which was already excellent, has continued to improve. The staff know they need to get you to your show on time—all of my visits have been pre-concert or pre-opera—and they do it well, without ever seeming to be in a rush. Ask about any item, and a clear, patient, encyclopedic explanation will follow.

On the current menu, antipasti are $17–25, pastas $20–28, entrées $30–45, side dishes $10–15, and desserts $10–12. A traditional four-course Italian meal will thus set you back around $90 to $100 a head before wine, but I seldom eat that much before a show, and I am probably not alone. Indeed, the staff actively suggest that pasta dishes be ordered as mains or in half-portions.

We shared the Reginette Verdi al Ragú Bolognese ($24; above left), which the kitchen divided and served in separate bowls. This was one of the more enjoyable pastas I’ve had in quite a while. The reginette is a fascinating noodle, shaped like a long, thin, green zipper. The ragú was a rich mix of veal, pork, and beef, topped with just the right kick from parmigiano-reggiano.

But Halibut ($36; above right) was on the dry side. It was served over excessively salty lentils baked in chicken stock and pig trotters, but I couldn’t taste those ingredients. This seems to be my fate at Lincoln, where the wonderful dishes are offset by the less successful ones.

With the petits fours (right) there’s no argument. They may not be the fanciest, but they are more than sufficient.

So that’s the status of Lincoln circa late 2011. The professional reviews have started to improve. Esquire’s John Marianai called it one of the best new restaurants of the year. Gael Greene in Crain’s recently gave it “three hats” out of four, noting, “It is thrilling to watch a shy, insecure adolescent grow into a magnetic, irresistible beauty.”

But even allowing a year for Lincoln to improve, the Post’s Steve Cuozzo could only give it two stars recently, just slightly better than his 1½ stars a year ago.

I’m with Cuozzo. I very much want to like it better, but still cannot.

Lincoln (142 West 65th Street at Lincoln Center)

Food: **
Service: ***
Ambiance: **
Overall: **