Good News for Italian Food Lovers

Also, vintage recipes. A great new product. And the best dish I've had this year....

The news dropped this week that Stephen Starr has bought Babbo and is bringing Mark Ladner in as chef. To those of us who love Italian food, this is excellent news. (Here’s a lovely piece Mario Carbone wrote about him for Eater.)

I have loved Ladner’s food since my very first meal at Lupa. When he was at Del Posto I thought it was the best Italian restaurant in the city. Then he left to do something wonderfully quixotic: he opened Pasta Flyer, a fast casual restaurant that served very good food for very little money. I was hoping it would become a national chain.

Alas, it did not.

But here are a couple of my favorite Ladner memories.

2017

Stopped in at Mark Ladner's Pasta Flyer, because I'm so curious as to why one of the city's most talented chefs left high-end dining to serve extremely affordable food. Fast food, in fact.

It's served like fast food. Very fast. The plates are paper and the forks plastic. But it doesn't taste like any fast food I’ve ever eaten. This portion of eggplant parmigiana is $2.50. Take it out of its paper cup, plunk it onto porcelain and it would be completely comfortable beneath elegant chandeliers.

These airy choux pastry balls are rolled in garlic butter and dusted in parmesan cheese, and if I lived nearby I'd stop in every day to plunk down two bucks for a bagful. These are what I wished zeppole were when I was a kid wandering through the feast of San Gennaro.

This is not squishy spaghetti. I don't know how Ladner gets the texture of the pasta right, but he does. The tomato sauce is a little sweet for my taste, the meatballs a bit denser than I'd like - but it's hard to complain when you're getting a substantial plate of food for $8.75. (The meatless dishes - fusilli with pesto for example - are only $7.)

The salads are lovely. There's wine and beer. For the price of the sad stuff you find in deli steam tables you get a really satisfying meal. I hope more of America's talented chefs follow in Ladner's footsteps; this could be the future.

2016

I can't stop thinking about these....

After hours at the St. Louis airport (flight delays), and a ride on a tiny, frigid plane, I dragged my suitcase and my bedraggled self into Del Posto to meet some friends. The warm restaurant felt like the most welcoming place on earth, and I sank into a seat at the bar and gratefully took a sip of Etna Bianco. Everything instantly felt right with the world.

Fantastic little bites began to arrive....

A rich, crumbly little caccio e pepe biscuit.

The most amazing little arancino - all crunch and crackle on the outside, all soft smoothness within. Rice has never been so lovingly disguised.

The famous soup of many chickens. Its intensity reminded me of a quote by the great chef Vatel. When his employer, Fouquet dared to ask why 50 head of cattle were required for a feast he was preparing for Louis XIV the chef drew himself up. "Monsieur," he replied, "I will reduce those animals to a single thimble." This is the most intense chicken soup you’ve ever eaten. And hiding at the bottom of the cup is the most amazing masa ball. In its dreams every matzo ball aspires to this feathery lightness.

The chef has a sly sense of humor. He calls this delicate dish suscmii del giorno -but I dare any Japanese restaurant to do better. Arctic char with caviar, fluke, tuna.... Pure pleasure.

I have always admired Ladner's agnolotti del plin. Making them is painstaking work, and these are tiny bursts of intensity.

Orecchiette with lamb sausage and broccoli rabe. Pasta in an entirely different mood: the flavors here are almost fierce, and the little bits of crisped porcini add a welcome bit of crunch.

But impressive as they all are, its those bauletti above that will haunt my dreams. Ethereal sheets of pasta, tender as flower petals, wrapped around sheep’s milk ricotta and bathed in truffle butter. A tangle of tastes and textures that left the slight tanginess of the cheese echoing through my body long after the last bite was gone.

There was more - my friends went on to lamb and chicken and dessert. But I was still lost in those bauletti, reluctant to release the flavor by taking even one more bite.

Babbo occupies the site of a classic Greenwich Village restaurant, The Coach House, which opened in the forties and lasted almost 50 years. It was famous for its corn sticks, its black bean soup and because James Beard ate there so often.

Trolling through my bookcase I came upon this book which was published around the time The Coach House opened - and it pretty much captures The Greenwich Village I grew up in. It was a friendly place; PS 41 (the old building, a pre-civil war monster, stood on the site of the current playground), was so small the principal knew every one of us by name. Sutter's Bakery was on the corner of Tenth Street and Greenwich Avenue and we’d stand there, breathing in the scent of butter and sugar as we listened to the women in the House of Detention shouting down to their boyfriends on the sidewalk. We'd linger, hoping that e.e. cummings, who lived in Patchen Place, the little mews behind our school, might come out.

It really was a place of artists, writers and musicians; nobody had much money (I don't think I ever met anyone who actually owned their own apartment), but the proximity to Little Italy, Chinatown and the old Jewish Lower East Side meant that we ate interesting food.

Strange, isn't it, to think of "Peter" Seeger as a "young voice on the radio"?

I love this directive half-way through Morris' Ernst's recipe. (Mr. Ernst, incidentally, co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union) : "Sprinkle with paprika, which has no taste but looks pretty." Tells you how long that particular spice had been sitting forlornly on his shelf!

.

I’m a big fan of Keepwell Vinegars - their celery leaf vinegar is a particular favorite - but I’ve only just discovered their Worcestershire sauce with its wonderful sweet and savory notes. (Ingredients: malt vinegar, soy sauce mash, sorghum molasses, apricots, persimmons, fermented oysters, peppers, lemons, spicebush berries.)

I found this lovely elixir at Heritage Foods, which is known mostly for humanely raised meat but offers a really fine range of pantry products as well.

Okay, I’ll admit I was skeptical; there’s been so much hype about Le Veau d’Or. But now I get it; the room is warm, cozy, intimate. The staff make you feel not only that they’re glad you’re there, but that they’re glad they’re there too. And the food is fantastic. These brains in lemon butter are like eating delicate clouds; definitely the best bite I’ve had all year.

And these jammy eggs en gelée remind you of all the reasons you want to go out to eat: the menu is filled with beautiful, delicious, and very cheffy food. When was the last time you cooked yourself some crosnes? (The wonderfully crunchy vegetables arrived with the turbot.)