A Voce
When Andrew Carmellini was running the kitchen at Cafe Boulud, Daniel Boulud’s celebrated Upper East Side restaurant, he was constantly sneaking Italian dishes onto the nominally French menu and winning great acclaim in the process, including a James Beard Award in 2005. Indeed, Carmellini turned Cafe Boulud into such an idiosyncratically great restaurant that people started to think of it as his and forget the famous name at the top of the menu. In this town, you can’t make that many people happy at a restaurant and not have investors offering their kidneys to team up with you, and in 2006 Carmellini left Cafe Boulud to start his own restaurant, the burningly popular A Voce. So successful has A Voce (“word of mouth”) been that after a mere 18 months in existence a second outlet was announced, this one slated for the Time Warner Center.
There for dinner recently, we saw why so many people love A Voce so much. (And we’ll add here that the diners on both sides of us spent most of the meal talking about their love for the restaurant, how frequently they come, how much they think about it when they’re away, and so on. They may well carry photos of A Voce around with them to show to their friends and neighbors.) The food isn’t as ambitious as what Mario Batali’s kitchens produce around town, nor is it the kind of traditional Italian standards one finds at restaurants like San Domenico. A Voce aims for a middle ground, food that is accessibly straightforward with just enough of a spin to leave you wondering why you can’t cook like this at home. You’re supposed to leave spreading the word, not speechless.
We started with a trio of appetizers: a vegetable antipasti plate featuring sweet peppers, gooey burrata cremosa, and eggplant aggrodolce; roasted asparagus topped with a fried eggplant, brasaole, and truffle dressing; and one of the most raved-about appetizers in New York, the duck and foie gras meatballs, a perfect combination of sweet, rich, and meaty. The effusive server recommended the scampi ravioli, and we paired that with a mezzi rigatoni with lamb amatriciana (instead of the standard pork and beef), a hearty dish that might not be in keeping with the season but is eminently satisfying. And for dessert, the bomboloni, puffy Tuscan donuts filled with cream and served with chocolate sauce. After all that, even the sweltering summer night somehow seemed a little more sweet. Now let us just show you this picture in our wallet...
Photos: thanks
