Bill Buford’s Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, chronicles, in part, his year of working as the “kitchen bitch” at Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca and includes sexy descriptions of their legendary pasta. After finishing it, I made an immediate trip to Molto Mario Batali and Joseph Bastianich’s West Village HQ.
In a previous life, Babbo’s building was home of the storied Coach House restaurant of much-loved black bean soup and lamb chops. Babbo pays homage to it in its upstairs bathroom with Coach House memorabilia. If restaurant spaces can be haunted, it seems they can also be charmed. Babbo certainly feels that way.
While waiting for our table, we stood crammed into a small entranceway packed with tables for the reservationless and a crowded bar. Soon we headed for the quieter upstairs where, with the huge skylight, it feels like a rooftop garden.
The hundreds of choices in the wine tome (list doesn’t quite cover it) all started to look like cuneiform. Luckily, the low-key sommelier swooped in to ease my decision-making process. “Why don’t you just start with a prosecco,” he said.
Clever sommelier. Soon a glass of the Drusian Prosecco di Valdobbiadene arrived ($9), straw-colored and crisp.
Babbo’s menu is also extensive. We decided to create our own tasting menu and ordered several antipasti, primi and secondi dishes. And here’s one of the testaments to how much the staff at Babbo know their shit. I couldn’t say to our waiter: Excuse me, Mr. busy waiter-man, we know that it’s a Saturday night and we’re sitting in some prime Manhattan real estate here, but we’d like it if you arranged the order of our dishes, paced them slowly, gracefully and split them between us. But that’s exactly what our clairvoyant server did. Now, that’s Italian!
After the Three Goat Cheese Truffles with Peperonata ($12)—little goat cheese balls rolled in multicolored spices—the next dish, Garganelli with “Funghi Trifolati” ($20), should have been delivered with a trumpet flourish. The mushrooms (oyster and porcini)—awash in a light cream sauce atop and hiding between largish rolled tubes of house-made pasta—were intense, foresty and, well, very mushroomy. It reminded me of foraging for mushrooms in Italy as a little girl, which is odd since I’ve never been to Italy.
Then on to Bigoli with Sea Urchin ($26), a special. It wasn’t. Next was Babbo’s signature dish, Beef Cheek Ravioli with Crushed Squab Liver and Black Truffles ($21). Now I know it’s immature, but saying (or writing) beef cheeks makes me feel dirty—but never mind that. The nearly translucent pasta—apparently made by angels and filled with a flavor-fest of braised cheeks o’ beef—is rich and satisfying. The Ryan Phillippe look-alike manager checked in: Was everything OK? Was it?! Go away Ryan and leave me alone with my beef cheeks!
The Spicy Two Minute Calamari Sicilian Lifeguard Style ($23) was rumored to be a Ruth Reichl favorite, so I was expecting the dish to be immediately addicting. I enjoyed the fresh tomato sauce, caperberries, olives, pine nuts and cous cous, not to mention the very tender calamari, but it was no beef cheeks.
One final bow to Babbo: They could charge twice as much. They don’t, and I think that’s great. What was our bill with a couple glasses of wine, several courses and served with four-star aplomb? $122 before tip.
Nearly floating, sated and happy, into a recent summer’s eve in January, my girlfriend and I, two confirmed lesbians, planned to continue our steamy Batali love affair. “Let’s go to Otto soon,” my girlfriend said. And so we will.
Babbo
110 Waverly Pl. (betw. 6th Ave. & McDougal)
212-777-0303
