the 941

Mario Batali has long been a personal hero of mine. I have religiously watched every episode of the now-discontinued Molto Mario. I own three of the Italian chef’s cookbooks. I devoured Bill Buford’s volume on the man and his food. But until last Saturday, I had never eaten a bite at a Batali restaurant.

This lack has an easy explanation. All of Batali’s restaurants (Babbo, Lupa Osteria Romana, Esca, Otto Pizzeria and Del Posto) happen to reside in Manhattan, and the best of the bunch (Babbo and Del Posto) are not the easiest joints to get into. When my wife Rachel and I planned a trip to New York City for last week, I would have considered it a failure to not get a seat at Babbo, but it took careful planning.

Reservations for Batali’s flagship restaurant (and the primary subject of Buford’s memoir) must be made exactly one month to the day ahead of time, and the phones open precisely at 10 a.m. So at the appointed hour on Sept. 21, Rachel, my sister Teal and I all were on our phones dialing and re-dialing until one of us got through. It didn’t take that long really, about 10 minutes total, but the rigor required just underscores the fact that Babbo is not the kind of place you can just waltz into unannounced (unless you’re a celebrity, I’m sure).

So the night rolled around, a beautiful fall evening in Greenwich Village, just off the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. The restaurant is gorgeous, albeit tightly packed, with low lights reflected in the gleaming wooden bar and understated decoration in the dining room. I recognized the ma�tre d’ as a frequent Molto guest and felt starstruck. Rachel and I snagged a pair of seats at the bar and downed a glass of prosecco and a negroni respectively.

After being seated, dinner started promisingly, with a small dish of ceci (chickpeas or garbanzo beans) set on bruschetta (woe to those of you who pronounce this word with a “sh” in the middle) and drizzled with fragrant high-quality olive oil. The wine list is impressively thick, loaded with vitnages from every region of Italy, but the sommelier steered us toward a reasonably priced Friulian white amidst the overwhelming selection. For dinner, we settled on the traditional tasting menu, an eight-course culinary marathon. While we ordered, John Waters and companion were seated next to us. I would have said something to the guy, but I’ve never seen one of his movies, so what the hell do I know?

The trek across the Italian landscape began with porcini sliced paper-thin (served as a “carpaccio“) and laid on the plate with stracchino cheese and more peppery olive oil. Next up was a dish of pappardelle with chanterelles and thyme, the fresh egg pasta just on the underdone side of al dente (aka perfect), with a buttery sauce. Duck tortelli were up next, my one complaint being that the duck flavor was lost a bit in the flavorful sugo finto (a “fake sauce” because instead of simmering away for hours on end like a traditional tomato sauce, it was slammed together fast with tomato paste applied directly to the heat of the pan) accompanying the pasta. Our waiter served us grilled guinea hen next, all crisp, fatty skin and succulent meat. The traditional secondo finished off the intense savory portion of the meal and we transitioned into dessert with a slice of Coach Farm cheese piled next to a spoonful of honey chock-full of toasted fennel seeds. A gelatin course followed that and then we hit the pair of desserts: a toasted hazelnut brioche with a marscapone cream, and a tart served up alongside a scoop of gelato. Both amazing, particularly with a double espresso.

It was a little hard to not be disappointed as we walked out the door, not that the food wasn’t worth the (for us, at least) exorbitant price, but that we knew we wouldn’t be back for a while. I went into the meal with absurdly high expectations and they were pretty much met. I might quibble about the gelatin course (with four savory and the rest cheese and desserts, I would have traded the gelatin for a seafood course before the hen), but little about the meal was anything less than perfect. Rachel and I spent the next hour or so strolling around the Village, our bellies overfilled and our heads dazed from flavor and love.

Forgot to mention: Babbo also has one of the finest soundtracks of any restaurant I’ve ever been in. Bob Dylan segued into a long series of cuts from Cornershop’s fabulous When I Was Born for the 7th Time, which transitioned into epic chunks of The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. The first-rate rock ‘n’ roll underscored the Babbo ethos: serious, but playful.

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