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Adventure (Try a Goat’s Head?) Is Still on the Menu at Babbo
Babbo
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- Babbo
- ★★
- Italian
- $$$$
- 110 Waverly Place, Greenwich Village
- 212-777-0303
When the waiter asked if we wanted the last roasted goat’s head, I didn’t think it was a big deal. It was just another night at Babbo.
This was around 1999, a year after it had opened, when Babbo had few peers among Italian restaurants, serving unusual meats with a side of light decadence. In this classically simple Greenwich Village townhouse, an energetic and pleasure-seeking chef named Mario Batali wanted New Yorkers to try something new: a salad of truffled lamb’s tongue; melting pink windowpanes of head cheese; triangles of beef-cheek-filled pasta in a sauce thickened by crushed squab livers. The strategy was to tempt us and dare us at the same time.
Back then, Babbo funneled you toward giving up all restraint, right down to the wine pours, which were sold by thirds of a bottle instead of fifths. So when the chance to eat a goat’s head was dangled before me, I saw it as the natural outgrowth of an entire philosophy of eating and drinking that I wanted to adopt as my own, at least for as long as it took to find out which parts of the face were good to eat (the sides) and which weren’t (the eyes).
Mr. Batali and his business partner, Joe Bastianich, now own about two dozen restaurants in the United States and Asia. Babbo remains the empire’s spiritual home, where the original formula of adventure and pleasure and curious-minded indulgence is still intact, where you can still try recipes that sprang from Mr. Batali’s forehead when he was only a minor celebrity.
Now that he’s superfamous, Mr. Batali could probably pump up the prices at Babbo. He hasn’t. That’s one reason Babbo is still one of New York’s essential restaurants. But it isn’t quite the same restaurant. The cooking doesn’t always have the old finesse and bravado that my colleague Frank Bruni found when he gave the restaurant three stars in 2004, when it was last reviewed in The Times. The service, meanwhile, can go in and out of focus more than it used to.
From the restaurant’s beginning, overbooking has been an issue. Even now, when reservations are not as much in demand, the bar is often crowded with people waiting to be seated.
This narrow area is less a waiting room than an exercise studio. One recent night, three guests and I ducked and bobbed and turned every minute or so as somebody tried to squeeze through with a hot plate of food, or an empty chair, or an armful of coats. This lasted 30 minutes. We never got an apology, but we did get to work on our balance and core strength.
What bothered me more than not hearing “I’m sorry” was that nobody acted as though half an hour was an unusually long time to keep customers waiting.
At the table, the style of service I got seemed to depend on whether I was there for the first or second seating. An early-evening dinner rolled along like a skateboard on new concrete, and the check came with the coffee. A meal that began after 8 p.m. was slow, even draggy, and at times it seemed we had dropped out of sight. Our sommelier was smart and engaging as he talked about a Sardinian red we were curious about (as ever, the all-Italian wine list is a mix of blue chips and underrated discoveries), but after decanting it, he was nowhere to be seen and our glasses stood empty.
On another night, four people ordered appetizers, but only three of us got them.
Mr. Batali discusses changes to the menu every week with Frank Langello, Babbo’s executive chef since 2003. Mr. Langello’s kitchen is run by professionals who seem to know by instinct when to take meat off the flame; even tricky ingredients like rabbit were faultlessly done. Given how many classic dishes are on the menu, the cooks could probably make half of them with their eyes closed. Sometimes you wonder if they do.
I suspected that the salt had been left out of the soupy polenta served under Babbo’s long-running (and still terrific) beef braised in red wine, the brasato al Barolo.
A salad of lamb’s tongue and browned beech mushrooms topped with a soft-cooked egg was nice. But the salad was warm and the egg was cold, so it was not as nice as it could have been. I felt the same way about a grilled guinea hen leg; it would have been easier to love if the skin hadn’t been rubbery and damp.
And a banana crostata could have been exceptional if its crust hadn’t been soft and its flavors melded together, as if it had been made too early in the day.
These glitches were far from catastrophic, but they were frustrating because I could usually imagine, or remember, just how good the dish was supposed to be.
And with some recipes, there was no need to imagine. Babbo’s pasta station can still turn out the hit singles with plenty of the old shimmy-shimmy-shake, like the beef-cheek ravioli or the “mint love letters,” parcels of minty lamb sausage under a bright tomato sauce.
Some of Babbo’s most exciting pastas stand on more delicate flavors. Goat cheese tortelloni, like little folded paper hats, were slithery with warm butter that was seasoned by dried orange peel and fennel pollen: lovely and transporting. And when the calendar said spring was here, the kitchen was ready with asparagus tossed with tender, slick fettuccine and brittle crinkles of sautéed pancetta.
Rebecca DeAngelis’s desserts are memorable, too; that glum banana crostata was an outlier. The saffron panna cotta is seductively musky, its perfume offset by dried apricots soaked in passion fruit purée. And the friends with whom I shared the olive oil cake — a simple drum with a crisp top and a tender middle, splashed with a bright-green squiggle of peppery olive oil — still text me about once a day to ask if I remember how wonderful it was. I do.
To say that Babbo’s long suits are its pasta and desserts is just to praise those courses, not to diminish the others. Antipasti, like the steamed mussels poured with their garlic-laden juices over thick toast, or the octopus and just-tender borlotti beans in a fantastic, citrus-packed, lightly spicy limoncello vinaigrette, manage to be very active without seeming frantic.
Mr. Batali and Mr. Langello work hard to chase boredom away, but they know when to stop, and you can see that in such main courses as the pork chop, so plump it could pass for a baby ham, with cherry peppers, or the lamb chops you could pick up by the bone if you didn’t mind getting broccoli rabe pesto on your fingers.
Still, I keep thinking about goat’s head. In those early days, I knew Babbo could ace the weird stuff. I’m not sure I trust the restaurant the same way today. Then again, I’m not sure I want another goat’s head, either.
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