No way we could spend a week in New York and read Heat (full review later) without darkening one of Mario Batali's doors. So with Da Fanch's gourmand cousins in town from Norwich, all seven of us walked over to Otto, his pizza place.
In Heat, Buford reports that Batali took many weeks, maybe months to get the pizzas, cooked on a flattop griddle, not in an oven, to the point where customers stopped sending them back. ("There were complaints. They were too spongy. They were undercooked. They weren't crispy. You couldn't cut them with a knife. Joe wasn't sleeping: 'Everyone is suddenly a fucking pizza expert.'" - p.160)
We didn't send ours back, though we didn't think they were oh so molto. I had the bottarga and fennel; Fanch had the mushroom. We liked the crust; we liked the sauce; but both toppings were too salty, the mushrooms unpleasantly so. I fretted: perhaps they're supposed to be salty, and we're not eating them with the right appetizers, or something. Perhaps we're not good enough.
This was crazy talk, of course. Someone in the kitchen had a heavy hand with the salt. Period.
Everything else was top-notch. The apps came in large ramekins and several went around the table. All delicious, especially the cold lentils, the octopus, and the eggplant caponatina, all redolent of late-night outdoor Mediterranean dinners eaten ad hoc, dish by dish at the proprietor's whim.
The waiter showed great patience as we maneuvered the Schnoodle's stroller through a maze of tables, and again as certain members of our party took interminable amounts of time to decide what to order. We also had internal disagreements about the wine selection -- what seemed like hundreds of Italian wines to choose from, none less than $35 a bottle, and none of us knew a thing about them. The waiter was unflappable. He recommended a bottle, not cheap, and damn if he didn't match it to our criteria. We ordered a second bottle.
Stuffed to the gills, we ordered a couple desserts anyway: the olive oil and ricotta coppettas (coppette?). Olive oil gelato at first sounds like a candidate for a Yuck?, but it was sublime. Gotta get the A-Ron to put it on his menu at the next Page Street party.
One complaint, other than the pizza, was the noise level. I was sitting under a speaker, and the music, a mix of guitar rock and Brit-pop that might well have been streaming right from Mario's iPod, kept changing volume level with songs getting cut off in the middle. I know it's a pizzeria, but at these prices, the kids in the kitchen shouldn't be fighting over the stereo.
Coming soon, part 3 (mistakenly advertised in the last post as Part 2): Revenge of the Beefeater, a Venezuelan hideaway, and Oh! Deer.
