The Weatherman
Well-Known Member
I spied this in the March 27th issue of New Yorker. I was laughing for hours, it seemed. The author is Nick Paumgarten.
Tables for Two: Del Posto
"The first hint that there is something preposterous about Del Posto, Mario Batali's colossal new venture on the far West Side, is a sign outside announcing "Valet Parking, $29." Inside, numerological curiosities abound. The tap water is "triple-filtered," as is the dining experience: you seem to have at least three waiters. Dessert comes in three acts (to say nothing of the cookie cart). Three is also how many stars the Times gave Del Posto recently, despite Batali's dream of four, and how many days you may need in order to recover from polishing off a cone or two of the cured pork lard that comes with the bread.
Batali and his partners, Joseph Bastianich and his mother, Lidia, have been threatened with eviction by their landlord over construction that they may or may not have done without permission. The dispute is as overwrought as the atmosphere. The extreme pomp of the place--the footstools for ladies' purses, the high-tea piano music, the miles of marble, the fleets of flatware--can feel like a put-on, as though this were the setting for a reality show in which celebrity chiefs compete to see who can charge out-of-towners the most for offal. Some of the dishes may have you looking around for the hidden cameras: the pici, for example, a hollow pasta served here with black truffles, coxcombs, and duck testicles, which are bigger than you might imagine and do not taste like chicken, or duck.
In the realm of difficult meats, nothing tops the bollito misto. From a tableside steam cart, a cook produces one pale distended body part after another--a veal's tongue, a pig's head, a pig's foot stuffed with sausage--and carves off a portion before returning each hunk to the broth. Next to this barnyard boil, "lamb three ways" looks like beans and rice. The sprawling menu offers subtler pleasures, such as a cauliflower sformato (a custard, sort of), with a salad of skate and grapefruit, and chestnut ravioli, with pigeon and myrtle. Too bad they don't deliver."
lolololololololololololol
Tables for Two: Del Posto
"The first hint that there is something preposterous about Del Posto, Mario Batali's colossal new venture on the far West Side, is a sign outside announcing "Valet Parking, $29." Inside, numerological curiosities abound. The tap water is "triple-filtered," as is the dining experience: you seem to have at least three waiters. Dessert comes in three acts (to say nothing of the cookie cart). Three is also how many stars the Times gave Del Posto recently, despite Batali's dream of four, and how many days you may need in order to recover from polishing off a cone or two of the cured pork lard that comes with the bread.
Batali and his partners, Joseph Bastianich and his mother, Lidia, have been threatened with eviction by their landlord over construction that they may or may not have done without permission. The dispute is as overwrought as the atmosphere. The extreme pomp of the place--the footstools for ladies' purses, the high-tea piano music, the miles of marble, the fleets of flatware--can feel like a put-on, as though this were the setting for a reality show in which celebrity chiefs compete to see who can charge out-of-towners the most for offal. Some of the dishes may have you looking around for the hidden cameras: the pici, for example, a hollow pasta served here with black truffles, coxcombs, and duck testicles, which are bigger than you might imagine and do not taste like chicken, or duck.
In the realm of difficult meats, nothing tops the bollito misto. From a tableside steam cart, a cook produces one pale distended body part after another--a veal's tongue, a pig's head, a pig's foot stuffed with sausage--and carves off a portion before returning each hunk to the broth. Next to this barnyard boil, "lamb three ways" looks like beans and rice. The sprawling menu offers subtler pleasures, such as a cauliflower sformato (a custard, sort of), with a salad of skate and grapefruit, and chestnut ravioli, with pigeon and myrtle. Too bad they don't deliver."
lolololololololololololol
