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09/30/2004 Archived Entry: "Cacio e Pepe, the restaurant"

So I suppose I should write about my restaurant experiences here, something I did not do when I was on the radio everyday.

After visiting Italy, I try not to eat in Italian restaurants in New York for several weeks. They are invariably disappointing. It’s not only the cooking and the style. I need some distance from the flavors of the Italian ingredients. (At home, it’s another story. I can buy great ingredients for home cooking -- the Greenmarkets for produce, New York’s great Italian markets for cheese, cured meats, imported groceries.) But I don’t want to be disappointed by an Italian restaurant meal when I can be pleased by so many other things.

That said, I dared go to a new, small and charming Italian restaurant called Cacio e Pepe at 182 Second Ave., between 11th and 12th Sts. (212-505-5931). The name means cheese and pepper but it refers to a Roman pasta dish of nothing more than pasta … with cheese and pepper. The cheese should be grated pecorino, preferably pecorino Romano. The pepper is black.

The meal started out disastrously. Our waitress was decorative, and friendly, and trying hard to be a good waitress, but she knew less than zero about the food she was serving. So no question went answered correctly. She could not help us at all describing dishes we had questions about. We dared order the lamb’s liver anyway. It was an appetizer. We asked that it be cooked pink. She didn’t say it couldn’t be, by the nature of the dish.

It was dead on arrival – thin grey, hard, gamey sliver-slices of what tasted like reheated liver. “This is old,” I told my friend, whose clever language you have read for years in magazines. She tasted. She called out to the chef, who just happened to be walking through the dining room at that moment. “When was this cooked?” she asked. “I just heated it up,” said the chef. “Yes, but when did you cook it.” “I sautéed it off yesterday,” he said, but it wasn’t an admission. He said it as if that was just fine. I considered the possibility that the liver was supposed to be grey and gamey, like the liver that is in the southern Italian concoction called soffrito. But the liver in soffrito benefits from being combined with other organ meats, and being cooked a long time with hot peppers and tomato. And it is chopped finely, so it can be used to season pasta or soup. This liver was just bad. And so was the fennel salad we ordered. It had been salted to wilt the fennel (I am giving the kitchen credit here, assuming it wanted the fennel wilted), and it was too salty to eat, even for the two of us who love salty food.

After two dishes like that, the shock of Cacio e Pepe was that the two pastas we ordered were fabulously delicious – perfect. The namesake dish is made with tonnarelli, which is a square cut strand pasta, flour and water only, no eggs, but fresh. The spaghetti-length strands of pasta were partly dressed in the kitchen with grated cheese, black pepper, and a bit of the pasta cooking water, but come out to the table in a partly scooped-out wheel of pecorino Romano. The waiter (not our inept waitress) gave the pasta a final toss, making the dressing a bit creamier, then he served out of the cheese. A tour de force! Delicious and a show.

(The menu says the cheese in the cacao e peppe will be formaggio di fossa, which is a different cheese, from Emilia Romagna, and the idea, which I think is novel, got me all excited. I have a wheel of formaggio di fossa in the refrigerator right now, and as I have been nibbling on it, I am quite familiar with its funky flavor. I don’t think there was any formaggio di fossa in this dish. But it was plenty delicious, so I am not complaining about the bait and switch.)

We also ordered paccheri with slivers of zucchini and chick peas, supposedly with a few drops of colatura (spelled scolatura on the menu). Paccheri are a very Neapolitan pasta that are rarely seen in New York. (Actually, they were never seen in New York until very recently. When I was writing “Naples At Table” I had to hand carry paccheri from Naples to New York to test my paccheri recipes.). They are huge tubes that collapse when cooked, so that when you lift a piece of the pasta from your plate with some sauce caught in it, it makes a sound. The sound is supposedly like the sound of a slap, and in Neapolitan dialect, slaps are paccheri. At any rate, this plate of paccheri was superb, the big tubes in the mingled broth of the chick peas and zucchini, touched lightly with the colatura, another Neapolitan product, the salty juices that are expressed by anchovies when they are preserved in salt. I can’t wait to go back to Cacio e Pepe just to eat more of that.

Not that our main course wasn’t an attraction. We shared one, a plate of oxtails, expecting to have also eaten two antipasti, which we didn’t. (We sent back both the lamb and fennel salad.) The oxtail meat, braised with tomato, was off the bone and although there was some connective tissue that could have been cooked a little longer, for the most part they were tender and succulent. They came with three nice disks of gnocchi alla Romana, which are made with semolina and flavored with cheese to have a crisp surface and mush-like interior, and some nicely blanched and sautéed julienne vegetables.

Dessert was a joke. All of them were so bizarre that they made the one we finally decided upon seem like a grandma specialty. It was a green tomato strudel with basil sorbet. The green tomato part was fairly pleasant, although the pastry was soggy. My friend hated the basil sorbet, which she rightly said was ices, not sorbet. But I, who usually hates herb-flavored frozen desserts (which are all the rage), thought it was refreshing and interesting. Basil is close enough to mint for me to be tolerant of it in dessert.

Bottom line: The pastas were so unbelievably good, I can’t wait to go back and try more. And I am sure there must be some other main courses at least as good as the oxtails. I do wish management would train the wait-staff better – inform them of what they are serving so they can answer questions. Our waitress thought Naples was in Sicily, it came out during our conversation about colatura, which I was explaining to her. And when she took the oxtail order, she asked, “And what temperature would you like that,” as if they could be rare or well-done. “Hot,” answered my friend.