As at Four Horsemen, where an oeuf mayonnaise is zebra-striped with squid ink and humble beans are treated like precious gems, Curtola trusts his diners to venture beyond obvious crowd-pleasers. I was impressed to see how many tables around me had ordered the nervetti, a chilled salad of beef tendons, cut sliver-thin, with shaved white onions and pickled chive blossoms. To my palate, the dish isn’t entirely successful—tendons are a textural ingredient more than a flavorful one, slippery and jiggly-wiggly, so over all it tastes like a scoop of marinated onions destined for an Italian sub—but folks seemed to be thrilled by it anyway. The pleasures of chewy textures are on better display in a shallow bowl of trofie, teeny-tiny handmade pasta twists cooked to a lovely springiness. They’re tossed in a shocking-green pesto, which is typically herbaceous and cheesy and has the unmistakable buttery-soft flavor armature of pounded pine nuts. Forget caviar, forget truffles: true luxury is sweet and resinous Italian pinoli, an increasingly precious crop that can run to more than a hundred dollars a kilo.
Those dreamy pine nuts show up again, whole this time, and paired with golden raisins in an agrodolce that adheres a fried fillet of eel to a piece of crackly toast. It summons Sicily, but also the Apennines, and Venice, and a little bit of China, too, in the airy way the eel is fried. I was skeptical of the addition of unshelled mussels to a classic panzanella, then almost immediately conceded: against a juicy mess of tomatoes and vinegar and fried bread, the little tender blobs of meat nearly—but, crucially, don’t quite—disappear, their toothsome softness almost mushroom-like. A different kind of surprise came with the farfallone, giant pasta bow ties that are tossed in an amber-dark chile butter with batons of smoky pancetta the size of a pinky finger and a generous shower of bread crumbs. I felt an unexpected swell of emotion at first bite, the pink-tinged melancholy of memory, then realized: somehow, inexplicably, the dish had evoked the precise salty-sweet savoriness of a can of SpaghettiOs with sliced franks, but lusciously complex and tingly with heat. (To be very clear, in my book the resemblance is a marvellous plus.) Sip something from the extensive list of natural wines—a gravelly Dolcetto from a teen-genius winemaker, maybe—or a nicely balanced cocktail, boozy or zero-proof, and feel, for once, happy to have grown up.
Like its across-the-street sibling, I Cavallini wears its coolness with total disregard, giving off not a whiff of snobbery or pretension: its charisma seems arisen, not cultivated. At both places, getting in the door can be a challenge—I’ll be honest, I haven’t made it past the gates of the Four Horsemen in years, but I had great luck at I Cavallini showing up at 5 P.M. as a walk-in. Once you’re in, a meal is smooth and unhurried, with warm service overseen by the partner and managing director Amanda McMillan. The room, woodsy and rustico, with checkerboard floors and occasional Scandi flourishes, feels built for living in and for poking around, a please-touch museum of artful objects and accents. Even the wine lists are delightful physical specimens, bound in corrugated cardboard in homage to the nineteen-seventies Italian cookbook series In Bocca, and découpaged with psychedelic illustrations from the books. Still, however gemütlich the vibe, there’s no denying that you are in a status restaurant—celebrities! Wait lists!—and, inevitably, the kitchen recently introduced a status dish: an enormous and sublime rib eye, on the bone, girded with a ribbon of pearlescent fat and topped with a melting scoop of caramelized-onion butter. Only a few are available each evening, but if you aren’t lucky enough to land one there’s plenty of consolation to be found in the chicken. It’s a heritage half-bird pan-roasted and served in pieces, with the leg still attached to the foot, its toes elegantly flexed, high-kicking off the edge of the plate—the ol’ razzle-dazzle, exquisitely scented in garlic. ♦
