At the New Babbo, It’s Batali Minus Batali

On my first visit to the original Babbo—God, it must have been twenty years ago—I remember being stunned at my first bite of the beef-cheek ravioli. (“Of all the pasta dishes—indeed, of all the dishes—on the menu, this is probably the one most associated with Babbo,” Batali writes of the recipe, in “The Babbo Cookbook,” from 2002.) I froze. I think I stopped chewing. I was astounded that a mouthful of food could be so forceful and so silken at once. I wish I could say that I felt the same way about the version at the new Babbo. Some of the disappointment, I’m sure, had to do with the difficulty of measuring up to memory, but it was also right there on the plate. On one evening, the filling was oddly crumbly and dry, and on another the ravioli’s thick chicken-liver ragú—a striking departure from the light, buttery emulsion that dressed Batali’s original—was broken and greasy. These miscalibrations made no sense: Ladner is a known genius of noodles; even Pasta Flyer, his doomed fast-casual attempt, produced superlative food. At Babbo, he’s putting his own spin on Batali’s star dishes, as any chef of his calibre ought to, but these changes only work if they make the dishes better.

Why keep Babbo going at all? This, to me, is the big question. Babbo was wonderful, epoch-defining—but it was. Its revival, like any revival, is a sort of exhumation, and inevitably also a bit of an autopsy. We know what went wrong; the investigation into Batali’s misdeeds helped win the Times a Pulitzer, for goodness’ sake. The big, brash, magnificent era that came before all of that, when the island of Manhattan was studded with Batali joints, each one exploring a different facet of the cuisine of Italy, came to an abrupt and ignominious end. Starr’s Babbo might be most generously understood as an attempt to surgically separate art from artist: it asks us to revel in the heyday of Babbo, its warmth and vivacity, while studiously avoiding any acknowledgment of the man who created and embodied it. This isn’t an outlandish request—we’re great at selective sanitization; not too many Great Gatsby-themed parties feature dead bodies in the swimming pool—but in this case it’s a futile one. Batali’s presence is so strong at Babbo, even now, that his orange Crocs might as well be mounted over the door.

What this new Babbo needs to be, to own its history and to transcend it, to justify its obsession with itself, is spectacular. This is all the more true when it comes to drawing in (and bringing back!) new diners, the ones who can avoid all the uncomfortable questions surrounding the restaurant’s revival simply by not knowing its backstory at all. Maybe you weren’t following the news; I don’t know, maybe you had barely been born. You might be aware, broadly, that Babbo is important, that its reopening is noteworthy, that it’s buzzy as hell right now. And then you come in for dinner, have a nice meal and a glass of a significant Barolo or a frothy tomato Martini, and you leave thinking that Babbo is just an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, rather on the expensive side, with a lovely atmosphere, terrific service, and food that’s hit or miss. It might not stand out, especially, in the landscape of dining rooms serving terrific pastas and osso bucos and zabagliones in New York City right now. Sure, it used to be all red sauce and Sinatra in this town, but then some force took hold a couple decades ago that shook everything up, made all the richness and personality of Italian cuisine come exhilaratingly into focus. Thanks to Batali, in all sorts of ways, things will never be the same. ♦