A “Top Chef” Winner Reheats at Il Totano

Despite these bright spots, I found the over-all experience at Il Totano bizarrely off-kilter. The space, sitting a few steps below street level, is narrow and near-windowless; its low ceilings, tight quarters, and garish colors give an impression less of the lemon-scented hillsides of Sicily than of being stuck below deck on a new-money schooner. In fact, very little at Il Totano evoked the Tyrrhenian pleasures promised by the branding and décor. Not that it’s misery; it’s just not very Italian. The pastas are oddly forgettable, with the exception of the terrific duck meatballs—a callback to a Thai-inspired dish that Dieterle cooked on a long-ago episode of “Top Chef,” and which became a signature at his first restaurant, Perilla. It’s served with a scant handful of mint-flecked cavatelli, which, I assume, is what earned it a spot on this menu. In fact, most of the dishes I found exciting seemed to draw their sparkle from anywhere but Italy: that tropically inflected kampachi crudo; a savory and somewhat Teutonic fried pork cutlet under a tangle of bitter greens; a first-rate salad of arugula topped with fried calamari and chunks of soppressata that reads more Jersey Shore than Amalfi Coast. The cocktails are on another planet entirely: for some reason, they’re mostly named after kids’ shows from the previous century—Snorks, Wuzzles, Rainbow Brite. It’s the sort of forced, dated cheekiness you might expect at an airport bistro, not a swank new West Village joint with hot-spot aspirations.

Italian seafood, a quirky Village brownstone, an iconic “Top Chef” winner’s triumphant return: the combination should be magic, or at least magnetic. The fact that it isn’t strikes me as out of synch with what I remember of Dieterle’s approach to cooking from his earlier forays—though it does seem more or less in line with how it feels to eat at the other restaurants created by his new business partners. Dinner at Hoexters, the Shapiros’ new Upper East Side brasserie, has the five-years-ago feel of date night in the suburbs; Flex Mussels (whose uptown location remains open) is a mid-tier bistro getting most of its mileage out of a food pun. This is, I suppose, more a matter of taste than of flavor. Despite their cringey names, Il Totano’s cocktails are solid, especially the Inspector Gadget, a sherry-splashed Martini that’s jauntily garnished with a caper berry. The plump shrimp dressed in peperoncini butter are tender and sweet (even if it stings to have to pay extra for the focaccia that the soppable sauce demands). The linguine with clams is textbook—tender pasta, briny littlenecks, garlicky garlic, salty pink nubs of guanciale—and that’s good enough, when it comes to linguine with clams. But everything about the restaurant, its successes as much as its missteps, points to all the ways that it could have been more. ♦