Emilio's Ballato

Tonight was Round 2 with Emilio's Ballato on Houston between Mott and Mulberry. The first time I ate here was a Thursday night with 4 friends. We sat around one of the few tables in the narrow dining room that stretches back from the Houston-facing front door and filled the next 2 hours sipping Emilio's fine red wine (I think he actually makes and bottles it), indulging in several of his mouthwatering classic appetizers and entrees including meatballs and eggplant parmesan, enjoying great conversation and at the end of the night, we received a special tour of the new private dining room and downstairs club renovations. Talk about Italian hospitality.

This time around I took my order back to the apartment and found that the food was just as magnificent out of house as it was in house. While there was definitely magic to the dining in experience, the majority of it comes from the food. Tonight we ordered the broccoli rabe, arugula salad with oranges, fennel and meyer lemon vinaigrette, tagliatelle bolognese, and linguine with clams in a white wine garlic sauce.

Though these may sound like pretty standard Italian dishes you could find anywhere on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, the quality of ingredients makes them anything but standard. Exceptional is the word. The bolognese reminded me a lot of Capo's rigatoni with truffle meat sauce in Santa Monica, where the meat is rich but not heavy, the weight of the sauce kept in check by the light oils and absence of tomato. For the linguine with clams, what stood out the most to me was the pasta itself. I often don't think too much about pasta quality but this stuff was so good that it made me pay attention. The tagliatelle pasta in the bolognese was equally as premium--both pastas made into soft dough with a little bit of gluten elasticity but not so much that it sticks and bounces like a rubber band as so many dry pastas from the grocery store do. I wasn't surprised to discover later that they make their pasta from scratch every day. Moving onto the broccoli rabe. The rabe was super green--greener than spinach--and sauteed with olive oil, thick slices of garlic, and red pepper flakes. The arugula salad's soft, sweet, not-too-tangy meyer lemon vinaigrette was the complement of all complements to the peppery fresh arugula leaves (wouldn't be surprised if they got the arugula from a local source) and crunchy light shavings of fennel. I was practically drinking the leftover juices from the salad. Actually I did.....

Of all the Italian restaurants in this city I've tried, I must say Ballato and Babbo are tops. There are so many I've been to that imitate the rustic menus of cheese plates, cured meat plates, pizzas, pastas, ensalate and frankly, I'm getting a little bored with them. They're great don't get me wrong but when you see the same thing over and over, it feels less special. The novelty wears off after a while. Otto Pizzeria was the 1st of those types of Italian restaurants I ever went to and I'll never stop loving it but I think there's just too many copycats in the city these days. They'll never be able to make me feel like I'm eating in a hillside trattoria in old Italy like Ballato and Babbo do.