Some restaurants push their tasting menus. Rezdôra doesn’t. A few steps down from the sidewalk, on the same block of East 20th Street as Gramercy Tavern and the brownstone where Teddy Roosevelt was born, Rezdôra lists a “regional pasta tasting” for $90 on its menu. The region in question is Emilia-Romagna, whose refinements in the art of rolling and saucing noodles are admired even by Italians from other parts of the country.
Chances are that most of the five pastas in the tasting are exactly the ones you picture when you think about Emilia-Romagna, starting with tortellini in brodo. This would seem to make it an easy sell, and yet servers at Rezdôra never tried to sell me on the tasting. Until I asked about it one night, I had never seen the separate menu card that describes each course.
With some hesitation, I ordered it. Every one of the pastas was excellent, and one or two would be worth walking a long distance for. After the fifth course was gone, it slowly dawned on me that Stefano Secchi, Rezdôra’s chef and one of its owners, had just laid down a straight flush.
The tortellini were penny-size hoops rolled around minced and blended pork in a parcel just big enough to suggest the idea of meat. “This is a special broth made from older chickens,” a server said as he poured a steaming liquid from a kettle over the tortellini. It was the color of turkey gravy. The broth spent about half a day on the burner; drew some of its power from melted Parmigiano-Reggiano; and was more intense than canned chicken broth in roughly the same way that a dry-aged rib-eye is more intense than a McDonald’s all-beef patty.
CreditColin Clark for The New York Times
This was followed by a smooth, almost fluffy tomato-basil sauce over maccheroni al pettine, delicate tubes with ridges they get from being rolled by hand along a comb made for the job. Three straw-colored blobs that looked like melted Brie turned out to be a glossy and wonderful fonduta made from Parmigiano-Reggiano. From there it was on to tortelloni, each about three bites big, filled with plush fresh ricotta and shiny with melted brown butter in which a few sage leaves had been bubbled.
If we are talking about Emilia-Romagna we have to talk about ragù, and that was the next course, tossed with slim ribbons of tagliolini. Some people will find the ragù saltier than they like. Almost everyone will find it more tender and smooth than the last 20 or 30 ragús they ate.
The tour winds down with round, meat-filled anolini, a branch of the ravioli family that resides in Parma. They are served in something called crema di Parmigiano; you will not be far off if you imagine an Alfredo sauce cooked for one of the more sybaritic Roman emperors. This is not Rome, though, and the sauce gets the tart counterpoint it needs from an inky, 25-year-old balsamic vinegar poured straight from the bottle.
Mr. Secchi blew into town in May on a small gust of publicity whipped up over his time at Osteria Francescana, the Modena workshop where Massimo Bottura reconfigures the touchstone flavors of the region in dishes with names like “memories of a mortadella sandwich.”
Mr. Bottura’s approach to menu writing seems to have rubbed off on Mr. Secchi more than his experimental urges did. At Rezdôra, you are unlikely to catch the kitchen using any overtly modernist techniques, but you may well encounter “cherry season in Vignola,” a pleasant if somewhat too soupy plate of stracciatella with toasted almonds, almond milk and cherries both sweet and sour; or “cow grazing in Emilia-Romagna,” a sirloin basted with butter whose richness is modulated by a sauce of sweet red peppers; or “Grandma walking through forest in Emilia,” a transfixing plate of mushroom purée, slivered snap-pea pods and little hats of spinach pasta filled with braised leeks.
If we are tracing influences, though, Mr. Secchi’s cooking at Rezdôra seems to have been molded at least as deeply by his time working at the pasta station of another restaurant in Modena, Hosteria Giusti. Laura Galli Morandi, Giusti’s chef, steadfastly defends the style of the local nonna tradition that Mr. Secchi channels in his pasta tasting and other parts of his menu. Like a meal in Giusti’s four-table dining room, one at Rezdôra can and probably should start with prosciutto and other manifestations of salted pork draped over warm pillows of fried dough called gnocchi fritti.
Before leaving Italy, Mr. Secchi also cooked at Antica Moka in Modena and All’Enoteca in the Piedmont; after coming back home to Dallas, where he grew up, he ran the kitchens of two restaurants his parents own there. Still, I suspect the Bottura connection is responsible for the speed with which the bar stools fill up when the restaurant opens at 5:30 each night, for the difficulty of reserving one of the other 48 seats, and for the way would-be customers collect in eddies outside the door to strategize. Not much about the interior is likely to lure crowds; with its brick walls, timbered ceiling and bare wood tables, it looks like any number of Manhattan restaurants that emulate the trattorias, enotecas and osterias of Italy.
And of course, people who eat at Rezdôra have a way of becoming repeat customers. They come back even though it is still a young restaurant and occasionally makes a young restaurant’s mistakes. One night, the stewed cannellini beans placed alongside black sea bass and black garlic zabaglione were still crunchy; the rock shrimp served with strozzapreti could have been a little less tough and tasted a little shrimpier. And some of the original pastas aren’t quite as stunning as the classics, but then every grandmother in Emilia-Romagna could have told you that.
Mr. Secchi is still one of the most appealing new talents in years to enter the city’s Italian restaurant scene, the kind of cook who can unite ordinary people who just like to eat pasta and the fanatics who collect menus from Osteria Francescana. (The date-stamped copy of the regional tasting menu that’s given out at the end of the night, signed by Mr. Secchi and his kitchen crew, must be for this crowd.) He also has the good luck to come along when some of the figures who dominated New York’s Italian landscape for the past two decades or so have either disappeared or gone into hibernation.
There is one more workplace that I hope has left a mark on Mr. Secchi: his parents’ restaurants in Texas, both of which are called Ferrari’s Italian Villa & Chop House. The first has been in business since 1983, a life span that any restaurateur would envy. The odds are against Rezdôra’s being around 36 years from now, but Mr. Secchi and his business partner have made one move that tends to be associated with longevity in New York restaurants. They bought the building.
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