On my first visit to the original Babbo's – God, it must have been twenty years ago – I remember being stunned by the first bite of beef cheek ravioli. (“Of all pasta dishes – indeed, from All dish—on the menu, this is probably the one most associated with Babbo,” Batali writes about the recipe in “Santa's Cookbook“, from 2002.) I froze. I think I stopped chewing. I was amazed that a mouthful of food could be so strong and so silky at the same time. I wish I could say I felt the same way about the version in the new Babbo. Part of the disappointment, I'm sure, had to do with the difficulty of measuring in memory, but it was also right there on the plate. One night the filling was strangely crumbly and dry, and the next a thick stew of chicken liver – a striking change from the light, oily emulsion that coated Batali's original – was broken and greasy. These mistakes made no sense: Ladner is a renowned noodle genius; even his doomed attempt at shortcut made excellent food at Babbo, as befits any chef of his caliber. Changes only work if they make the dishes better.
Mark Ladner sets the dish.
Why keep Babbo at all? This is a big question for me. Babbo was a remarkable man who defined an era, but this was. Its revival, like any revival, is a kind of exhumation and inevitably also a kind of autopsy. We know what went wrong; investigation of Batali's crimes helped win Time Pulitzer, for God's sake. The big, bold, glorious era that preceded it all, when the island of Manhattan was dotted with Batali restaurants, each exploring a different aspect of Italian cuisine, came to a sudden and ignominious end. Starr's Babbo can be most generously understood as an attempt to surgically separate the art from the artist: it invites us to enjoy Babbo's heyday, its warmth and liveliness, while studiously avoiding any acknowledgment of the man who created and embodied him. This is not an outlandish request—we are very good at selective disinfection; Not many Great Gatsby-themed parties feature corpses in the pool, but in this case it's no good. Batali's presence in Babbo is so strong, even now, that his orange Crocs might as well be hung above the door.
What this new Babbo must be like to own his story and transcend it to justify his self-obsession is impressive. This is even more true when it comes to attracting (and returning!) new customers, those who can avoid all the awkward questions associated with a restaurant revival simply by not knowing its backstory. You may not have been following the news; I don't know, maybe you were barely born. Overall, you probably know that Babbo is important, that its re-opening is noteworthy, that it's pretty damn noisy right now. And then you come to dinner, eat deliciously, drink a glass of sizable Barolo or a frothy tomato martini, and leave thinking that Babbo is just an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, quite expensive, with a great atmosphere, amazing service and food that is hit or miss. It may not stand out, especially compared to the New York restaurants that now serve amazing pasta, osso buco and zabaglione. Sure, it used to be all red sauce and Sinatra in this town, but a couple of decades ago a force arose that shook everything up, forcing the richness and personality of Italian cuisine into the spotlight. Thanks to Batali, in every sense, the situation will never be the same. ♦
