More than a year ago, I was on the verge of reviewing Del Posto when the news intervened. The restaurant had changed significantly since the last time it had been evaluated by a Times critic: Sam Sifton promoted it from three stars to four in 2010, when Mark Ladner was the executive chef and Brooks Headley was running the pastry kitchen.
First, Mr. Headley had quit this stately, expensive Italian restaurant in Chelsea so he could sell fast, cheap vegetarian burgers. Next, Del Posto had spent about $1 million on crystal candle vases, white leather chairs and other luxurious fittings that made it even more stately and expensive. Finally, Mr. Ladner had left to sell fast, cheap pasta. A fresh review was clearly in order.
Before I could write it, though, a number of women who had worked for Mario Batali, one of the owners, started talking about the sexual harassment and abuse that they say he had doled out. Suddenly there seemed to be more important questions than whether the braised-rabbit agnolotti were cooked al dente.
Negotiations took more than a year, but Mr. Batali no longer profits from Del Posto, having sold his stake in March to a group led by his former partner, Joe Bastianich. Employees have said that Mr. Bastianich himself helped, at a minimum, to build the sexist and disrespectful environment in which Mr. Batali operated. Mr. Bastianich has apologized, saying that he had heard Mr. Batali speak inappropriately to employees, and that he should have done more to stop the sexual harassment.
Del Posto may be the grandest and most expensive restaurant in New York where women are in charge of everything you eat.CreditDaniel Krieger for The New York Times
Some diners will stay away, feeling that Mr. Bastianich has not sufficiently atoned. I understand this, but I am also interested in the way employees may be treated at the restaurant now and in the future. Here, there is reason to hope. Among other human-resources reforms, employees can now report complaints about owners or corporate officers to an independent investigative firm with the power to refer cases to outside counsel. As part of the restructuring, Melissa Rodriguez, who has been the executive chef of Del Posto since 2017, was made a partner in the restaurant, along with Jeff Katz, now the managing partner. A new pastry chef, Georgia Wodder, was appointed last spring.
Del Posto is, with the possible exception of Aquavit, the grandest and most expensive restaurant in New York where women are in charge of everything you eat, starting with the miniature saffron waffle rolled like a cannoli and stuffed at one tiny end with taleggio and at the other with fennel pesto, and ending with the prosecco marshmallow tucked into the wooden drawer of a custom-made cheese grater.
The cooking is more subdued now. The kitchen is not seen as a beacon of innovation the way it used to be, perhaps because Ms. Rodriguez is less interested than Mr. Ladner was in feats of technical derring-do like 100-layer lasagnas. She gets her effects by following old Italian templates and putting them together so elegantly that they seem to light up from inside. There’s an honesty to her approach — she doesn’t try to shoot out all the lights by supercharging dishes with fat — but it’s not the kind of peasant simplicity people usually mean when they talk about honesty in Italian food. It’s a sophisticated honesty.
You know chicken cacciatore, of course. Ms. Rodriguez’s version is made from guinea hen breast, roasted until the skin crackles like parchment. What would be the body of the stew is now a sauce; the tomato, celery and onion in it come through distinctly. Occupying a little sidecar is a pressed puck of braised leg meat under a single, Roman-style gnocco, a small featherbed of semolina held together by eggs, milk and cheese. One side has been broiled so hard it is nearly burned, which seems like a mistake at first, but turns out to supply the bit of campfire that this hunter’s stew needs. It has to be far more complicated to prepare than the cacciatore at your neighborhood Italian restaurant, but it seems simpler, pared to essentials, and wonderful in every bite.
I’ve never seen anyone wring as much flavor out of salsify as Ms. Rodriguez does. Sliced transparently thin and fried, it makes crunchy brown chips about half the size of an M&M. These decorate the top of a grilled-salsify pudding that has the refreshing bittersweetness of one of those plant-based Italian aperitifs. If it were not garnished with streaky leaves of radicchio, it could pass for a dessert.
The menu structure has not changed, although the prices have. Everything can be had à la carte. Lunch is still a relative bargain, though the price has shimmied up to $59 for three courses. For a blowout $194 dinner, the Captain’s Menu yields eight courses or so. Most people, however, go with the $164, five-course Menu del Posto. The primary argument in favor of this strategy is, to me, an overwhelming one: Two of those five courses are pasta.
Del Posto’s pastas are worth doubling up on. They can come in many forms.
Delicate conical tortellini have hidden pockets of nettles and spring peas; they are half-submerged in a light spring-vegetable brodo in which Parmigiano-Reggiano rinds once bobbed like bay leaves. This is the spring minestrone.
A single, plate-spanning raviolo, called a fazzoletto, is topped with poached mussels and filled with spinach and fresh herbs — not a lawnmower-mulch of greenery but a layer of emulsion as thin and velvety as the dough that envelops it. The sauce of mussel juices, white wine, butter and saffron makes this the only convincing mussel pasta I’ve ever had.
The range of flavors Ms. Wodder commands in her pastry kitchen seems unnecessarily limited to me, although I may be unfairly comparing her desserts with Mr. Headley’s, which roamed all over the place. Individually, her desserts are soothing, often showcasing the comforts of dairy. More emphasis, some extra acidity or bitterness, might have brought an assemblage of quince paste, brown-butter gelato and griddled brioche into relief. But I appreciated the way winter squash in the batter modified the sweetness of an olive oil-orange cake, and I enjoyed the moody sulkiness that amaro lent to a citrus salad served with the cake.
Del Posto has in recent years picked up a reputation as a restaurant for one-percenters. It rarely gives that impression once you are inside, where servers solemnly accommodate just about anyone. There is a vegan menu at Del Posto. A vegetarian meal can be put together easily, and almost everything can be made without gluten, including the pasta. Yes, the stockpile of Champagnes includes some lock-and-key stuff, and should you require a Barolo costing between $2,000 and $4,000, one will quickly be added to your bill. But among the 3,100 or so Italian labels superintended by Evan Clagnaz, the wine director, are more marked from $60 to $75 than I can count. Piemonte is a place to hunt, and Friuli, and the Valle d’Aosta, for starters.
Though the restaurant is not exclusively for rich people, it is explicitly for occasions. Once, when a reservationist called to confirm and asked whether I was celebrating anything special, I said no, and was gently laughed at: “Just a normal Tuesday night at Del Posto?”
There is little danger that anyone will mistake a night at Del Posto for normal. If nothing else, the napkins and towels are a tip-off. First, there is a small hot linen napkin scented with tomato-vine oil, to wipe the dust of the outside world from your hands. Then a large white linen napkin, followed just before dessert by a small yellow one. It is given to you, and the white one is taken away, by a server using a large fork and spoon as tongs. When you go to the restrooms, you may encounter an attendant who has just restocked the hand towels from a large basket she carries on one arm, like Heidi out gathering wildflowers for Grandfather.
There are little ceremonies like this from start to finish; I don’t know of any other restaurant that performs quite so many tasks whose only real purpose is to draw attention to themselves. And these things are rarely done with a smile; employees seem to have been directed to keep a respectful, formal distance as they carry out your requests and perform other services you’d never think of requesting. They rarely seem comfortable. Their solemnity is underlined by the sepulchral lighting at night, so gloomy it makes the crypt of Grant’s tomb look like a tiki bar.
A good deal of the service is the attentive, helpful kind that you really want, but the rest of it seems designed only to give customers the sensation of temporary power over other people. Some people may love this, but it reflects a serious lack of imagination when you think about the ways the service at Blue Hill at Stone Barns or Noma, for instance, is integrated into the experience. Is it stretching a point to ask if enshrining subservience, as Del Posto does, reflects the same twisted sense of priorities that allowed Mr. Batali to get away with abusing his own power for so long? (And is it a coincidence that far more men than women seem to work in the dining room, particularly in the upper ranks?)
Now that Ms. Rodriguez owns a piece of the restaurant, perhaps she can lead a reconsideration of priorities in the front of the house, and find a tone that more closely matches her philosophy in the back. She shouldn’t have to clean up the messes men made. But having worked her way to the top of a restaurant that has always aspired to provide luxury, she has a chance to decide what, in New York in 2019, that word might mean.
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