Birth Announcements
Although its name suggests otherwise, Bar Milano (see "Neo-Glassical Studies") , which opened in April at 323 Third Avenue, is an elegant and lively early breakfast through late night meals exercise in interpretive Northern Italian cuisine, the creation of Jason Denton (owner of Lupa), his brother Joe Denton (partner at ino and 'inoteca), and co-chefs Eric Kleinman (also chef/partner at 'inoteca) and Steve Connaughton (recently chef at Lupa). The 500 bottle wine collection focuses solely on Northern Italy's nine different regions. Overseeing the crafty cocktail menu is partner and modern mixologist extraordinaire Tony Abou-Ganim. The 26 seat bar and 60 seat dining room use classic Italian materials and architectural references—arched ceilings, round pillars, and marbled walls—to create a modernized sense of place. Apps ($12 to $20): terrine of rabbit, liver, artichokes, and carrots; shrimp stuffed pasta with mint and pea tendrils. Mains ($18 to $32): monkfish with foie gras, pear, and cabbage; coniglio fritto (fried rabbit with dried apricots and carrots).
A More Chic Sibling
First things first: Do not assume that Bar Milano, the newest sibling of ’ino and ’inoteca, is anything like them. In fact, if the ’inos are the cute fraternal twins of the Denton family spawn, then Bar Milano is the chic, sophisticated offspring living abroad in Italy.
Family dynamics aside, there are no panini or bruschette to be found here (at least at dinner), though the abundant wine list, a mainstay at all three restaurants, outshines pretty much anything else in the Gramercy area and hovers in the 500-bottle range. The décor is rich (think lots of leather and marble) yet still inviting. The wine wall, a floor-to-ceiling temperature- controlled storage device, is a solid reminder that it takes the vino seriously.
The lunch and dinner menus are the same, though some of the biggerportioned dishes (namely the enormous pork chop) are likely more enjoyed at a more leisurely pace. Start with the antipasti, specifically the patata imbotitta, a roasted potato with a farm egg, caviar and fontina ($12), and follow up with one of the house-made pasta dishes. Highlights include borsetti alla pizzoccheri, potato filled buckwheat pasta with cabbage and speck ($17) and the pinci con seppie, pasta with cuttlefish and razor clams ($22). Said pork chop, served with mustard fruit and escarole ($26) looks like something out “The Flintstones.” On the lighter side is the scallops with caviar and celery root ($25) and the rabbit, fried with dried apricots and carrots ($24) is already garnering much attention with returning patrons.
For dessert, the frozen trio of blood orange sorbet, almond sorbet and pistachio ice cream packs a punch, and chocolate lovers are likely to gravitate to the stracciatella parfait (chocolate ganache, goat’s milk and chocolate cones; all desserts, $10). Yes, the prices are far from the two ’inos’ affordable range; Bar Milano is more of a special occasion option. But the beauty of siblings is that there’s always room for another child in a great family dynasty.
Yes, the prices are far from the two ’inos’ affordable range; Bar Milano is more of a special occasion option. But the beauty of siblings is that there’s always room for another child in a great family dynasty
Good Times for Italian Wine Lovers: Scarpetta, Bar Milano, Dell’Anima
Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of how radically wine lists in restaurants have changed over the past, oh, fifteen years or so. I've been on a sort of Italian-resto-spree lately, and I'm coming out of it thinking that I'm either dreaming or I'm living in a golden age of Italian wine and food here in NYC.
Bar Milano. First off, if you're lucky, then partner Tony Abou-Ganim is going to be behind the bar mixing drinks here, as he was the night I stopped in. I asked him to make me something interesting with rye. He replied with a Rattlesnake, which, according to the 1947 edition of Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide is one ounce of rye, two dashes of Pernod, a teaspoon of lemon juice, a half-teaspoon of powdered sugar, and half an egg white, shaken with cracked ice and (in my case) strained onto rocks. Sublime on a steamy evening, and a good lead-in to poking around Bar Milano's all-Northern-Italian wine list. I bypassed the exceptionally weird 2005 Movia Lunar—I love Ales Kristancic's wines, but this stuff is odd to a fault—and instead settled on a bottle of the 2006 Grosjean Freres Cornalin from the Valle D'Aosta. This is the kind of wine that never, ever, in a million years would have appeared on a wine list back in, say, 1985 or even 1995. Utterly obscure, it was also mighty darn delicious—bright red fruit, potent but not weighty, distinctive and very fresh. Good with duck, you might think. I did, and it was. Plus the duck itself was superb, the skin crisp to a just-so toothsomeness, the meat tender and deeply flavorful (Pekin from D'Artagnan—good to know), the rhubarb compote that came with it a nice tangy-sweet touch as were the earthy, savory lentils.
Italian Beyond the Pasta
ITALIAN cooking is about a lot more than pasta, but an Italian restaurant that bungles its pasta dishes is like a Las Vegas resort that doesn’t let you gamble. There’s still plenty to enjoy, but you’re likely to feel that the essential point and signature pleasure of the place have been lost.
Bar Milano bungles its pasta dishes. Not all of them, but too many, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ones. And by pasta dishes I mean the “primi” section of the menu, which includes a few risotto dishes. Bar Milano bungles them as well.
That it still manages to be impressive, and at times immensely enjoyable, says a great deal about the seriousness that its proprietors and chefs bring to it.
Bar Milano is easily the most ambitious enterprise in which any of them have taken lead roles, and they have lavished money and thought on it, creating an Italian restaurant that is not just an anagram of so many others in a city that never tires of its tagliatelle.
Among the restaurant’s antipasti, primi, secondi and dolci you’ll find dishes that aren’t entirely familiar and dishes with lovely grace notes. If your path through them is fortuitous, you’re in for a terrific meal.
But there are also less rewarding routes, along with an overall sense — surprising, frustrating — that a dedicated team of accomplished pros have undercut a potentially excellent restaurant with some significant missteps.
What they do well, they do superbly: a rabbit terrine, crunchy-edged duck breast with duck sausage and lentils. What they do less well — orecchiette with lamb, lobster risotto, tagliatelle with favas — is hard to overlook.
Bar Milano’s DNA comes from Lupa, ’ino and ’inoteca. Its main partners — the brothers Jason and Joe Denton, who run the front of the house, and the chefs Steve Connaughton and Eric Kleinman, who supervise the kitchen — made their names and careers at one or another of those restaurants, all more casual, all less slick.
Bar Milano is slickness incarnate, in a glossy, contemporary way that befits its name and indeed evokes northern Italy.
Smooth, handsome wood surfaces define the lively bar area, where there is a succinct menu (spoken, not written) of salads, panini, fried food, skewers and the like. That menu channels some of the ’ino and ’inoteca spirit, though much of what I sampled during lunch there was curiously off key.
The dining room conjures a spirit of its own. One design element trumps all others, and it’s one of the restaurant’s missteps: a long, mesmerizing wall of marble strips and rectangles in different colors.
The owners must have paid a fortune for it, and are still paying for it, in terms of the room’s awful acoustics. You can see — in the carpeting, in the fabric on banquettes — attempts to fix the problem, but the cure isn’t taking. At a crowded hour you’ll spend much of your interactions with servers asking them to repeat what they just said or repeating what you’ve just said. Bar Milano is like a cellphone with constantly bad reception.
The menu is refreshing. It takes pains to honor northern Italy but also takes chances, reflected in four standout starters.
There is a silky garlic sformato, which is a molded savory custard. A scallop carpaccio is, as its name suggests, a flat, round sheet, and that might be too wispy a scallop fate were it not for the Meyer lemon that glosses the dish and the orange hillock of uni rising from its center.
Faro-stuffed cabbage keeps company with fried oysters in another happy surprise, and yet another involves slices of potato wrapped around egg yolk, enriched further by melted Fontina and capped by some caviar. A spud never had it so good.
While most Italian restaurants overwhelm pasta with its co-conspirators, Bar Milano sometimes gives it too little help. I wanted more of the lamb nuggets in the orecchiette, undercooked and doughy. I wanted more fava beans and also more of the promised mint with the tagliatelle, thickened with a goat-cheese sauce not appreciably more nuanced than an Alfredo.
Plastered to the top of “cuscini,” veal-stuffed cushions of pasta, were shards that the server identified as bread crumbs, but they did an uncanny textural impression of birdseed. As for the lobster risotto, it tasted mainly of something doing an uncanny impression of soy sauce. Put this dish in a trapezoidal paper carton and you have Chinese takeout.
And yet a subtly peppery, faintly briny dish of eggless noodles with cuttlefish and razor clams was a beautifully tuned marvel. Tagliatelle alla Bolognese had the right ratio of noodles to tender, flavorful meat.
The section of the menu devoted to main courses is the most straightforward: a lightly breaded, wholly satisfying veal chop; a flattened, boneless, crisp-skinned half chicken; an aged rib-eye with a marrow compound butter; plump scallops bejeweled with darkly glistening caviar. All were cooked to perfection.
Less straightforward, but also appealing, was grilled tuna with braised veal, a partnership possibly inspired by vitello tonnato. The anchovy mayonnaise and capers in the dish suggest as much.
Desserts aren’t one of Bar Milano’s strengths, but drinks certainly are. The wine list’s tight focus on northern Italy means you’ll find an uncommon depth of selections from such regions as Friuli-Venezia Giulia and the Piedmont. And Bar Milano puts enormous care into cocktails, both those of its own invention and classics that it resurrects and tweaks.
Try the 323 (named for the restaurant’s address on Third Avenue), because it combines rosemary-infused gin, reduced balsamic vinegar and strawberries. Also try the bracing, biting Corpse Reviver, if only for the pleasure of saying its name.
Throw back a few of these and you might not even notice the pasta.
Multiple choice: Farro
The Roman legions were fed on it, the word farina comes from it and before corn arrived in Europe from the New World, polenta was made with it. Still. confusion persists over just which grain farro is. mostly because Italians use the word to refer to three different species of ancient wheat: einkorn, spelt and eml}ler. The latter, rescued from the brink of extinction by a renewed interest in traditional foods, is increasingly found on restaurant menus in New York City. It has a nutty, wholesome flavor, retains a resilient texture when cooked, and its versatility lends itself to diverse preparations.
Bar Milano (323 Third Ave at 24th St. 212.683-3035) showcases the grain two different ways in one dish: crispy farro-flour-dusted deep-fried oysters sit atop tiny cabbage bundles stuffed with farrotto, nestled in a swath of lemony egg sauce.