Young and Hungry
Twin Falls, Idaho, is no one’s idea of a gourmet mecca, but it’s where Jason and Joe Denton first caught the culinary bug while helping out at their parents’ grocery distribution business. “From childhood, we would ride the truck, delivering to all the stores,” remembers Jason, 38. “It piqued our passion for food.”
Two decades later, that passion shows no sign of fizzling. This spring the brothers will open their third New York restaurant together, an upscale Italian eatery near Gramercy Park called Bar Milano. The goal, says Joe, 32, was to create the sort of place where “you can have a bowl of pasta at the bar or a truffle-tasting menu and a $500 bottle of wine.”
Up the Antipasto
We’ve gotten so used to chefs going casual that we forgot they could go the other direction. But the ’inoteca gang is upping their gastrogame at Bar Milano, opening today.
They’ve gone uptown, with a Third and 24th location (cue this resto wasteland singing arias of joy), and upscale, trading rustic exposed brick for beautiful marble panels.
Patata imbottito — an antipasto of potato, egg, caviar, and fonduta — is ’inoteca’s truffled egg toasts all grows up. The early word is strong on handmade pastas, especially ricotta-and-chard-filled concesi and razor clam and squid pici. You won’t want to share lobster risotto or the pork chop with mustard fruit and escarole. Save room for dessert, a twist on the Napoleon with blood orange sherbet, almond sorbet, and pistachio ice cream.
They’re serving 7 a.m.-3 a.m. Long hours befit lofty ambitions.
Openings
On April 11, Jason Denton (of ’ino, Lupa, and ’inoteca) and his brother and ’inoteca partner Joe amp up their culinary ambitions at Bar Milano, their marble-walled, suavely upholstered foray into Northern Italian fine dining. A few telltale signs they’ve left the rustic enoteca world behind them: A proprietary line of glassware designed and blown in Poland, all the better for serving mixologist-partner Tony Abou-Ganim’s $13 cocktails; a designated pastry chef who’s not only baking the contents of the bread basket but making his own bread crumbs—plus elevated riffs on classic sweets like sesame cookies and Neapolitan ice cream; and a pair of co- chef-partners, Steve Connaughton (Lupa) and Eric Kleinman (’inoteca), who’ve collaborated on refined fare like tonno vitello (pictured), an artful composition of grilled tuna, veal sweetbreads, and cannellini beans.