Pick a Name, Any Name

Some New Yorkers may remember that when the restaurant formerly known as Chickpea opened right off of Saint Mark’s Place a couple years back they had a contest to let people choose their name. Well, since then Chickpea has closed down. In it’s place is a new falfel house that also happens to be Glatt Kosher.

Terribly fascinating stuff, I know. What is actually fascinating about the new place is they are doing a reprise of Chickpeas naming contest. Head on over to Name-Our-Glatt-Kosher and submit your suggestion for a name. If your name is chosen you will be the winner of $3000. Not too shabby if you ask me.

Dinner with American Madness: Dell’Anima

Dell’Anima (literally, “from the soul”) is a gastronomic must-do. It is certainly among the top 10 meals I’ve had in the past few years.

As ardent readers will remember, back when we reviewed Babbo, we broke the news that sommelier Joe Campanale and friends would be launching a new Italian restaurant. We now enhance that scoop with another: a first look at Dell’Anima, certainly now one of Manhattan’s best Italian restaurants. Also, one of the most filling. Also, one of the few places where each seamless, hand-blown piece of glassware is costlier than your flatscreen tv.

Don’t ask me what we drank. It was excellent. My dining companions — master Wall Streeter Anthony Ritossa and his elegant wife Sandra, and James Beard award-winning chef, hotelier and executive recruiter Deborah — agreed that the food and drink at Dell’Anima were exceptional. I can hardly doubt you won’t concur. Any criticisms I could state would be petty: too much food if one gets all five courses, no foot massages at the tables, the servers were too nice to work at Le Bernadin….

It is worth going with several people, so that everything can be sampled.

Appetizers:
Definitely get the outrageous bruschetta platter. My favorite item: a mashed potato-like dish resembling what the French term Brandade de Morue but made with monkfish instead of cod. Also, try the onions that are tortured (or put in stress positions, as the Bush administration might say) to reveal all their flavors.

Pastas
The squid-ink fettuccine is the best version of this dish I have ever had, and I’ve been searching. I had previously considered the versions at Babbo and Novita the best, but for the first time I could actually taste the ocean in the dish.

The tagliatelle was very very good, but extremely heavy. One dish is enough for two people, and there’s no good reason to also order a main course if you get it. Unless, of course, you are, like myself, a glutton.

The risotto was a revelation. Typically, the heaviest dish on a menu, it was light and boasted a variety of flavors. It did not sink to the pit of the stomach and absorb one’s will to live (an unpleasant sensation and not to be confused with the apocalyptic desire to evaporate at a moment of extreme bliss described at the entre to this post).

Mains
We tried each of the four main dishes on offer. They included chicken, which I ordered because I wanted to get everything, but which I usually avoid on the theory that the chicken dish is there for the unadventurous and is usually the least accomplished item on the menu. But this was an an altogether worthy item and held its own against the tender lamb shoulder with polenta.

Full disclosure: the food and drink were gratis, but I would have crapped on the restaurant had the food been lousy. You’ll just have to take my word on this. We did, of course, leave an excellent tip. The service was pretty much perfect. Our waitress was one of those beautiful people who sings gorgeous ballads on Myspace and is generally much cooler than you are. When faced with the average Manhattan waitress, who is absurdly likely to be an Ivy League-educated polymath with the balls to pursue a risky career in music, theater or art, I am reminded of Orwell’s ruminations on class gleaned from his stint working in a Parisian Hotel and restaurant (from Down and Out in Paris and London):

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

This is more true of our city, in which middle class salaries have been reduced to pauper’s pay.

Most of us are terribly risk averse. It was humbling for me to be in this restaurant and to meet its founders and feel the intensity of their nervousness. Veteran reviewers can be objective about new restaurants, but, as a novice, it is difficult for me not to root for Dell’Anima’s founders and employees, whose personal economics are on the line and who are striving for something more than a sales quota or a story deadline.

Whatever success the chef has contemplated, when I took that bite of fettuccine and sat back to ponder blissful oblivion, my next sensical thought was that he had achieved it.