So last Monday, my wife and I headed into Manhattan – I had a scheduled TV appearance and she wanted to hit a fabric store in Soho. We decided to have lunch and headed to Mario Batali’s Otto Pizzeria, which promised authentic, Italian-style pizzas, an enormous wine list (wasted on me, but I thought I’d mention it), and – according to at least two things I read on line – the best gelato in Manhattan. The pizza could be Velveeta served on cardboard for all I care, as long as there’s real gelato on the premises.
Unfortunately, the experience ended up reinforcing for me why I tend to avoid celebrity-chef restaurants. The food was a disappointment, and the menu was too heavily influenced by the chef’s whims, not by the food itself. It surprised me to run into this at a Batali restaurant; one reason I like his shows and his books is that his agenda seems to be a noble one: to celebrate regional Italian cuisine using authentic recipes and ingredients.
We ordered a funghi misti appetizer – mixed wild mushrooms marinated in herbs and garlic, delicious, earthy, and reasonable at $4 for close to a cup’s worth of ‘shrooms. I went with the pizza of the day, a pesto pizza with fresh mozzarella. Pesto genovese is made with basil, which doesn’t take heat very well, so pizzas made with pesto typically are cooked partway before a thin layer of pesto is added. Instead, I got a pizza with a thin crust (not as thin as the ones I’ve had in Italy) and a thick layer of bitter pesto that tasted like it contained spinach rather than basil (I asked – the waitress said there was no spinach in it). There was also very little cheese, so I was eating a cracker with bad pesto on it.
My wife’s entrée was better, as she ordered spaghetti carbonara. The pasta was really al dente – I’m all for some tooth to the pasta, but even I would have left this in the water another sixty seconds – and the sauce was done right. The one problem was that the dish was extremely salty, probably the result of the huge amount of pancetta in it.
As for the gelato … we didn’t have any. The dessert menu came – it took forever, now that I mention it, and the service in general was inattentive at best – and the list of flavors read something like this: olive oil, vanilla, pistachio, coconut, ginger, hazelnut straciatella, mint chocolate chip. I might have forgotten one, but you get the idea. Notice anything missing? That’s right – nothing chocolate or coffee. Not even tiramisu-flavored gelato, which was in every gelateria I visited on my trips to Italy. At $7 for three scoops, those flavors weren’t enough to get me to stick around.
Your review jives with what I have heard about Otto. I don’t think that your criticism that “the menu was too heavily influenced by the chef’s whims, not by the food itself” is indicative of his other restaurants. If you want any insight into why I would definitely check out (as I have mentioned before) Heat by Bill Buford.
I’ve got Heat on the wish list – might be something I get as an audiobook for all the driving I’ll do this summer. I’ve heard it’s fantastic, and I do like Batali’s TV personality, so I’m curious to read about a first-hand experience with him.
It is a really great book. Do you read the New Yorker? Bill Buford has had some really great food writing in it in the past year and a half or so. He had a piece about a dessert bar in Manhattan and the chef who runs it and another excellent one more recently about Gordon Ramsey. I would check them out with the caveat that the Ramsey profile will be much more interesting if you have already read Heat since it involved people who feature somewhat largely in that book.
Since you seem to be a big fan of good authentic gelato, I was wondering what your favorite gelaterias are both in the US and in Italy. When I was studying in Rome I used to frequent Della Palma (a few locations around Rome, biggest one is near the Pantheon) and found that one the best bet. They had a huge selection and the gelato was always especially creamy and not icy or grainy at all. In the states the best gelato I have had was in Dallas of all places. There is a place called Paciugo there (the owner is Torinese, and a recent entrepreneur) that has some very good gelato and is quite often of the proper consistency.
Favorite in the US is Gelatiamo in downtown Seattle. Haven’t been there in years – maybe not since 2001, now that I think about it – so I’m not even sure it’s still open, but their gelato was legit, and the parade of attractive young Italian women working behind the counter didn’t hurt either. (The summer I worked in Seattle, they had one girl from Venice, probably early 20s, who was easily one of the four or five best-looking women I have ever seen in person. I tried to talk to her in Italian, but she wasn’t terribly friendly to me until the day I walked in with my wife, at which point I got a huge smile and wave.)
I haven’t been to Italy since ’99, unfortunately. The best place we hit on that trip was L’Orso Bianco in Pisa, which was brand new at the time. They had two of the most amazing flavors I have ever had: Mousse Meringa, a smooth vanilla gelato with crushed vanilla meringues in it; and Cioccoriso, a semisweet chocolate flavor with tiny bits of chocolate-covered puffed rice. It was like a Ben & Jerry’s twist on gelato. There was also a place in Florence – no idea what the name was, but I can still picture it, it almost looked like a bar inside with lots of dark wood, and the gelato there was amazing. That was before I learned to write stuff like that down so I wouldn’t forget.
One honorable mention: Spaghetti Eis in Budapest, where they offers sundaes made with gelato extruded to look like pasta, meatballs, etc. We just got the regular stuff, but their “sculptures” were pretty impressive.
Let me echo your thoughts on Otto. I had pizza there about a year ago and was incredibly disappointed. If you haven’t yet, check out Cronkite Pizzeria the next time at yearning for excellent pizza hits you in NYC.