MARIO Batali, who launches his largest restaurant yet this month, is braving the Italian Jinx of 2005. In a town with an unlimited appetito, three new, ambitious biggies from other celebrated Italian kitchen stars have all strained to fill seats.
The slow starters were among 2005’s most hyped debuts. Yet, both Alto and Maremma have dumped their original esoteric menus, and Piano Due is still waiting for the crowds.
Their owners say everything’s going to be just dandy. But let’s hope Molto Mario has a smoother start with Del Posto, his venue for “cucina classica” opening soon on 10th Avenue behind Chelsea Market.
“There’s nothing you take for granted,” Batali says. “The only thing you can take for granted is that people seem to like Italian food, but you can’t take for granted that they like anything new.”
This year’s earlier, high-profile launches were either too over-conceptualized for an enchanting but basically simple cuisine, or too elegantly tailored for a dress-down age – or both.
Batali says he worries about luring customers to a “very elegant,” two-level dining room off the West Side Highway. “We are definitely at risk.”
And although the menu will be “traditional,” it will also offer an 11-course tasting option that will change its regional focus every month.
Pino Luongo, who popularized Tuscan-inspired cooking in the early ’90s and today runs Coco Pazzo, Tuscan Square and Centolire, says, “The popularity of Italian food in America is based on familiarity.
“When I’ve stuck to that principle, my restaurants have run well from the beginning.” But when he launched Amarcord, “It was hard for people to relate to,” and it soon closed.
That doesn’t mean customers want a return to Italian-American red sauce – but chefs tempt fate when they channel too much energy into obscure corners of The Boot.
After Scott Conant’s L’Impero made Tudor City a foodie destination for the first time in 80 years, Conant, who once worked with Luongo, could do no wrong. But Alto, his 85-seat, high-concept Midtown showcase for the Alps-ish cuisine of the Alto Adige region found itself in a fight for its life, despite many marvelous dishes.
Alto’s menu first included cockscombs, schupefnulden and krauts – odd items in a candlelit space. Last May, I wrote that “too much Mitteleuropean baggage weighs things down.”
Conant says, “The menu did not resonate with the clientele. It was a rough summer, and I thought August was never going to end,” adds Conant, who admits to “a lot of prayers.”
“Three German words created a problem,” he says. They’re gone now, and even with some spaetzle and speck, the menu reads like other northern Italian ones.
“It was the most difficult day of my life when I changed the menu,” Conant says. “We still have the schupefnulden, but now they’re called bone marrow dumplings and they fly out the door,” he laughs.
Conant says dinner has “taken off” since summer, although lunch has yet to “take off the way we hoped.”
Maremma, too, looked like a no-brainer. Chef/owner Cesare Casella’s Beppe packs them in with Tuscan-style cooking often better than the real thing.
But Casella chose another tune from the obscure repertory: the “cowboy-style” cooking of Maremma, the Tuscan ranch country, which he transplanted to the West Village last summer. Its kitschy-sounding “spaghetti Western” menu did not set off a stampede.
“I started with idea of Tuscan cowboys,” Casella explains. “But it was difficult for customers to understand this food,” which included “Rocky Mountain oysters” – cornmeal-crusted bull testicles that tasted mainly of hot pepper.
Casella’s fans from Beppe were not enough to fill 120 seats, and locals stayed away. A month ago, he remade the menu along the lines of a trattoria with entrees like lemon chicken with herbs, although he kept a few cowboy dishes. Maremma now breaks even.
Michael Cetrulo runs TriBeCa’s popular Scalini Fedeli, a Zagat Survey favorite and recipient of a Michelin star. His new Piano Due in the old Palio space offers some of the best pasta and Italian entrees I’ve ever had; yet on all my visits, fewer than half of its 85 seats were full.
Don’t blame the menu, which Cetrulo calls “my own interpretation of simple Italian cooking” – which belies the intense flavors he coaxes from classics. The problem is a second-floor, unfashionably Old World-style, formal-looking setting.
Cetrulo says he’s not worried. Scalini Fedeli, too, took time to catch on. He says Piano Due, which opened in August, will take “between a year and a year and a half” to hit its stride.
Batali knows he’s not immune from the troubles that beset the others: “We don’t see ourselves on a different plane at all. We just hope our food and service are good enough that people will want to come.”
steve.cuozzo@nypost.com
