After years of marveling at Mario Batali’s creations on Food TV, I was really excited to have dinner at Del Posto, but it turned out to be anti-climactic. There was a lot of bravado surrounding food that was only good enough… bordering on just okay. I only got excited by one dish out of the five that I had. The food is expensive for what you get, and it generally lacked pizazz — what I remember most from the savory dishes were the flavors of pepper, salt, butter, and oil. I wanted more unique flavors to come through. And frankly, the options for the main course were pretty mundane.

I also wasn’t comfortable with the service. There were way too many servers hanging about, and they didn’t seem well-trained. Instead of pulling together for a seamless level of hospitality, it was clunky, and called more attention to itself than it should have.

What I liked was that there were quite a few ingredients used that aren’t in everyday use (like perilla, rue, cavolo nero, and red wattle sausage), and they were interesting additions to the dishes. The bread basket was also great — especially the breadsticks. I also liked the design of the restaurant — grandiose, especially with the second floor ringed on the inside by opera house-like balconies with a curved metal design that enabled you to look down at the first floor. It’s beautiful.

Foodwise, I liked dessert best, so I’m going to start with that. It was all the more impressive because it’s a tricky dish to pull off…

Crostata Invertita di Pomodoro - Heirloom Tomato, Almond Cream, Fennel Seed Gelati. My first bite of this was the revelation that I’d hoped for at Del Posto. The caramel was perfectly matched to the tomato, in a way that I’d never encountered before. The waiter explained that the tomato was baked at a high temperature it a syrup, so it was primed to meet the sweetness of the caramel while still retaining its tomato-ness. I liked how the fennel seed gelati was also sweetened just right (not too much) so that it provided a refreshing, creamy backdrop to the tomato/caramel. The puff pastry crust was rather soggy from the tomato and caramel, but I was cool with that I like my chewy caramel.

Zabaglione - Served Chilled with Locally Grown Macerated Fruit. Nice. Tasted like zabaglione should.

I was also intrigued by the unique dessert tasting plates that they do — three chocolates with three rums or three parmigiano reggiano cheeses (which is all the more interesting because they’re all Luigi Guffanti cheeses, but two years apart… so it’s like a vertical cheese flight).

Petit-Fours Plate. These were plated up tableside from a large cart, and overall, they were very good — especially the mint meringue kisses.

So, anyway, back to the beginning of the meal…

Lardo and Butter. The lardo is apparently pork fat whipped with rosemary and garlic. We liked it a lot, but I’m still baffled by the fishy taste it had and the little fibers that were throughout it. The waiter insisted that there was no fish in it.

Carrot Sformato with Maine Shrimp and Cavolo Nero. I’m always intrigued when something doesn’t taste like its main ingredient. The sformato had a strong pepper-y and almost woody taste with a strong finish of cream, but I wouldn’t have been able to identify it as carrot (unless maybe it was the essence of it strongly roasted?). The shrimp were perfectly soft, and I liked the little chew and bitterness added by the cavolo nero. I’m not crazy about the combination of carrot and shrimp, but the sformato’s unique flavor made it more compatible.

I got this dish b/c they were out of the lamb sweetbreads that I originally wanted.

Funghi Misti with Guanciale, Toasted Garlic, and Zucchini. Good, with a very strong bite of salt, pepper, and garlic.

And we ordered the pasta tasting for the table, so we chose among the list of pastas available. I was expecting them to bring them out all at once, but they were brought out as ind’l courses. This was good and bad. You have the opportunity to appreciate them all in their own right, but it adds a lot of time to the meal and you feel yourself getting very full by the end (or really, early-to-middle). Some people barely touched their main courses as a result; but the restaurant has a cool doggie bag system — you are given a coat check-like ticket, and you claim your bag at the door, rather than having the bag sit on the table for the rest of your meal. A couple people at our table were given the incorrect ticket, though, so we had to swap around bags at the end.
The pasta all seemed to be cooked rather al dente, and there was lots of oil and butter involved.

Spaghetti with Spicy Crab, Saffron, and Perilla. Perilla is an herb that’s similar to mint or fennel. This was very spicy, but I wish there was more crab and maybe something to cut the spiciness occasionally. I’m not sure about the presence of saffron here — it seemed lost amid the spiciness.

Orecchiette with Red Wattle Sausage, Chantarelle, and Rue. Rue is an herb that grows as an evergreen shrub. The little brown flecks of it resembled mushrooms and truffles, and they were a delightful, deepening touch to the flavors of the sausage and the chantarelles.

Agnolotti dal Plin in Parmigiano Reggiano Brodo and Summer Truffles. These had a creamy guinea hen and veal filling.

Pike with Spotted Radicchio, Pancetta, and White Corn Polenta. Boring. The pike very fishy with a stretchy skin. I just ate the radicchio and corn, and they tasted about as exciting as they sound.

Duck Breast with Apician Spices, Apricot, Almond, and Endive Salad. Good.

Grilled Arctic Char with Potato Piccolo and Genovese Pesto. Nicely unctuous arctic char, and similar to salmon.

Pork Loin with Cipolla Ripiena and Roasted Black Figs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 10th, 2006 at 12:42 pm and is filed under New York, Restaurants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.