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06/01/1999 Archived Entry: "Italian Restaurant Reviews: Al Di La and Maratti"

You'll excuse me if I took some time off from writing this diary. What with the crunch of getting this website rolling, and all the other stuff of life and work, I felt I needed a hiatus. I've also been having more computer trouble, but ... enough excuses.

So what did you miss? Not much in the way of home cooking. I have been very lazy and cooking only the simplest, most familiar things. No new recipes.

However, I have not yet reported on two wonderful restaurant meals last week. One was in my very own backwater Brooklyn neighborhood, at Al Di La, at 248 Fifth Ave., Brooklyn, on the corner of Carroll St.. The other was at an elegant upper East Side restaurant, Maratti, 135 E. 62nd St., near Madison Ave, which is an Italian restaurant specializing in seafood but, refreshingly, not claiming any particular region of Italy, as too many restaurants illegitimately do these days. Maratti's chef is from Naples, so there are a few Neapolitan items on his menu, and you can bet he knows how to handle fish. But I'd have to characterize Maratti's style as chic international-set Italian, although that sounds pejorative and I mean it only in the best sense. It's simple, skillful cooking with the best ingredients and the utmost respect for them. Now that's Italian!

Al Di La is more or less Venetian, with some of the authentic and a few unusual specialties of the region, including incredibly well cooked liver Venetian-style, which is to say thin slices of pink liver with lots of sauteed onions and a touch of vinegar. It's a true "Mom & Pop" trattoria. The husband-owner-host is from Venice (or at least from somewhere in the Veneto, the surrounding region), while the wife-chef-owner is American. The two put together a dramatic room without much renovation or compromise to the airy, corner space and its big plate-glass windows. There's swaged red drapery, a huge Venetian crystal chandelier, the original tin ceiling painted in a cacophony of color strokes, and a mish-mash of old furniture, including a few long wooden tables where several small parties can be seated together, community-style -- or one big party. It's an informal and convivial atmosphere; sort of artsy looking.

The night I was there last week, Stanley Tucci and a bunch of friends took up one of the big tables. You should remember Tucci from the movie Big Night, in which he played the uncompromising chef in a small restaurant he owned with his brother, the maitre d'. Stanley is also Puck in this summer's movie of Midsummer Night's Dream. Al Di La could well remind Tucci of the restaurant he had in Big Night.

As far as I know, there are no other truly Venetian restaurants in New York, but I think Al Di La is getting the attention it is (every publication in town seems to have reviewed it) more for the rakish looking room, the marvelous cooking, and the very fair prices, than for any kind of perceived "authenticity."

So what did we eat?

A fabulous, creamy-textured garlic soup -- I suppose a signature dish in that it is so popular it is always on the menu no matter how much the rest of the menu changes.

A very unusual pasta -- crescent-shaped ravioli filled with diced sweet beets and dressed with butter and poppy seeds. The ravioli dough was so thin you could see the red beets through it -- just as it should be. Actually, my pet peeve about ravioli is joined edges that are tough. With such thin pasta, these double edges were like other pasta in a single thickness.

We also ordered a whole, small, farm-raised stripped bass baked in salt. The salt doesn't leave the fish overly salty, but it does make the delicate flavor more intense and flesh firmer. It cost $18. The same fish in a mid-town restaurant would cost at least $10 more.

My second course (after pasta) was pork saltimbocca -- two thin, sauteed scallops of pork, crispy around the edges, with small sage leaves that looked like chevrons mysteriously adhering to the surface of the meat. These came with sauteed potatoes that I could not stop eating even though I had already consumed my daily allotment of starch via the pasta. (I rationalized that the pasta was so thin and light that I could afford a few potatoes.) The saltimbocca was pretty impressive, too. I don't know how the chef keeps the thinnest possible slices of pork so moist, yet beautifully browned, but I am determined to find out.

In a nod to my self-imposed new rule that I should find a good wine to recommend at every restaurant I like, try the better of the two Valpolicellas. I usually hesitate to order this Veneto red wine because it is so very light, but this example has rich body and mouth-filling fruit. You can't do better for $24. Dinner per person, all told, should run no more than $40. (No reservations accepted.)

Maratti, the other Italian I went to, is in another stratosphere. It's on the high-ceilinged, second floor of a townhouse on the upper East Side, elegant in its simplicity and luxury, and expensive. The tables are large and widely spaced. The walls are a light but festive yellow, accented by bright blue Venetian glass sconces. The carpet is a colorful diamond pattern. The European-style casement windows were open wide the night I was there. It felt absolutely glamorous. And was. Even though it was obvious that most of the people in the room were treating Maratti as their neighborhood restaurant, it is one of the richest neighborhoods in the world.

With a bottle of Greco di Tufo Villa Giulia ($36), one of Campania's most beautiful white wines, we nibbled on a plate of fried calamari and fried little fish -- mainly little fish, I must emphasize, not mostly inexpensive calamari. Right off, the chef won me over. Instead of the usual tomato sauce on the side, a totally American touch, we got two lemon halves, which I would have sent the waiter to fetch had he not brought them unsolicited.

For a first course, I could not resist ordering spaghettini with anchovies and shaved bottarga. Bottarga is pressed tuna or mullet roe, an exotic and expensive specialty of Sicily. It was shaved over the top of a beautifully balanced bowl of pasta. This I thought was another test of the kitchen, since I consider spaghetti with anchovies one of my own specialties. If the kitchen could please me with this, it could please anyone.

A first course raw artichoke salad was also spectacular -- and spectacularly simple -- practically paper thin shaved raw artichokes with great olive oil, the right touch of salt, and lots of lemon juice. As someone who has trimmed up piles of artichokes to make this sort of salad, I really appreciated being able to get it in a restaurant. That's what chefs are for.

As an entree, I tried the Neapolitan's cook's version of pesce al aqua pazza -- fish in crazy water. The fish in this case was a fillet of Mediterranean bass (yes, imported) in a bowl of gorgeous broth flavored with garlic, cherry tomatoes, parsley and a little hot pepper. I'm sure that this one started out with a carefully tended fish stock, unlike the home version you can find in my cookbook, Naples At Table. And it was sensational. They gave me a soup spoon for the broth and I sipped up every last drop.

A special of grilled prawns was sensational, too, even if the frisee salad it came with sort of overtook the plate.

For dessert, we had the only thing I found disappointing -- the pastiera, which is the Neapolitan ricotta pastry. This one was all pastry and not nearly enough ricotta filling.

Otherwise, I'd say Maratti was almost perfect. Certainly, if I had an ocassion to celebrate and the money to spend (about $80 a person), I'd choose Maratti over many another restaurant. It has a sense of welcome and civility that many high-end Manhattan restaurant's lack.