There are two reasons Italian restaurants will always be popular. First, the cuisine. Italian cooking is simple, satisfying and not terribly expensive. But the real secret behind the staying power of Italian restaurants is that Italians run them. As long ago as 1879, a guidebook to New York noted the prevalence of Italians in the restaurant trade, "a business for which their natural politeness renders them peculiarly fit."
Their presence and influence has never waned, because they understand that the main goal of a restaurant is to make customers happy. If they do the job right, something mysterious happens. Diners convince themselves that a good meal was a great meal.
This minor miracle occurs regularly at Acqua Pazza, a solid but unspectacular Italian seafood restaurant that scores exceptionally high on appearance and decorum. The surroundings are attractive in a severely understated way, with a lot of warm browns and cool blues and handsome sepia-tone photographs that support the seafood theme. A single clam, or an octopus tentacle, takes on the aura of nobility when given the Ansel Adams treatment.
The welcome is warm, starting with the coat check attendant, who manages the trick of seeming pleasantly surprised each time the front door opens and a new patron walks in. The waiters fuss in a friendly way. The written menu, they make clear, is merely a suggestion. The main thing is getting you what you want.
It helps that Acqua Pazza has a clear point of view. The chef, Massimo Girardi, formerly of Felidia, is dedicated to seafood and holds firmly to this guiding principle. There is no meat on the menu, period.
He also emphasizes simple preparations with up-to-date ingredients and seasonings, which is to say, very traditional ingredients and seasonings that can seem modern because the restaurant has hung trendy, highly specific name tags on them. Thin slices of raw hake dressed with a creamy lemon sauce are sprinkled not just with salt but with red volcanic salt. The tomatoes in the restaurant's signature dish, acqua pazza, are pomodorini di collini, or cherry tomatoes from San Marzano.
The name acqua pazza means "crazy water," and it refers to the age-old practice around Naples of baking fish in a bath of seawater, wine, olive oil and tomatoes. True to form, the restaurant notes that the olive oil is from Liguria and the salt is from Sicily. The menu doesn't say it, but someone actually fetches the seawater from the Atlantic. The name is more interesting than the dish, which is pleasing but plain.
Olive oil and seawater meet again, this time as a dressing flavored with red onions and yellow pear tomatoes poured over warm charred octopus. This simple preparation, tart and briny, is perfectly suited to firm, meaty octopus. Grilled squid, another fine appetizer, is also handled with respect. The kitchen, showing confidence in the quality of the main ingredient, pushes it around with a little olive oil and garlic, squirts a little lemon on it and serves it up with baby artichoke and tomatoes.
Something goes awry with seared diver scallops, though. The scallops are impeccable, and Swiss chard puts up a pleasingly bitter resistance to their rich sweetness. Then, without, warning, cranberries appear. They make the greens taste harsh, and their sugars are cloying.
Acqua Pazza has gained a certain renown for an unusual pasta dish, tagliolini al caffè. The pasta is made with coffee grounds, a quirky method that dates back to the time when Sicilian sailors added the grounds to flour as a preservative, and eventually developed a taste for the resulting dough. The restaurant tosses the tagliolini with rock shrimp and porcini mushroom, making a rich, almost fulsome dish, which I find too much of a muchness, not nearly as appealing as neat squares of eggplant on a bed of tubular sedanini pasta, ricotta salata, plum tomatoes and basil.
Anyone looking for more excitement can go straight to the homemade pampanelle, thin ribbons of pasta that are tinted black on one side with cuttlefish ink. The two-color strands make a striking visual background for bright cherry tomatoes mingled with sea urchin and scented with basil.
The main courses can be real show-stoppers, when the kitchen does not slip into the bad habit of cooking fish medium-well rather than medium-rare. The sweet and bitter combination that fails in the scallop appetizer works wonders in a dish of pan-seared hake with pistachios, golden raisins and pine nuts offset by assertively bitter radicchio. Grilled swordfish, its strong, oily flavor tamed by flecks of orange and lemon rind, is served in a heady wine and mushroom sauce. At lunch one day, the fish was decidedly overcooked. Two nights later, it was cooked to perfection, and the dish was a triumph.
I still have queasy memories of John Dory with a texture like candle wax.
There is one department in which Acqua Pazza does not seem Italian at all, and that is dessert. The pastry chef, Cynthia Sweeney, formerly of Le Cirque 2000, shows no interest in singing the old Italian standards. Her style runs to elegant confections, notably a glistening dome of dark bittersweet chocolate that, like a giant bonbon, enrobes soft caramel and passion fruit cream. Soffiato al limone, another tricky production, could be called soufflé brûlée. It is a layer of ethereal lemon foam on phyllo pastry with a crisp lid of caramelized brown sugar.
The espresso at Acqua Pazza happens to be good. It is even better in Ms. Sweeney's chocolate and espresso parfait, a clean, sweet jolt of powerful flavor and creamy texture, with a crunchy chocolate tuile on the side. Combine it with an after-dinner coffee, and the meal ends with a definite lift. You are happy. And that makes the people at Acqua Pazza even happier. -- William Grimes
From "Friendliness With a Splash of Seawater," The Times, 11/19/03.