Osteria Morini is dedicated to the food and drink of Emilia-Romagna, in the north of Italy. So Mr. White makes the little Modenese hats known as cappelletti, pillowy little numbers that he stuffs with truffle-scented mascarpone and tops with garlands of wispy prosciutto. He serves them on a little grandma plate with a puddle of melted butter. You can sometimes hear gasps when people tuck into these, as they react to the feel of the dough in their mouths — the slickness, the taste, the excess in each bite.
He rolls beautiful garganelli, squares of eggy pasta shaped into quills, and cloaks them in cream and truffle-scented butter, adds more of that prosciutto and achieves the same result. He cuts wide ribbons of tagliatelle and serves them floppy and coated with a ragù antica: onion, carrots, celery, tomatoes, beef, pork, veal, chicken livers, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. It is Sunday sauce from some alternate world in which immoderation is only a starting point.
Mr. White’s pastas glisten with pork fat, with butter, with cream, with oil. They are aggressively salted. They hang around on the outskirts of Too Much.
That is true of almost everything on the menu of Osteria Morini, as it happens: of the fried Bolognese street snacks that can start a meal (little balls of molten béchamel, for instance, or skewers of mortadella, or squares of polenta topped with lardo), and of the immense affogato dessert (a cloud of zabaglione gelato, an ocean of espresso) that ought to end one.
Mr. White puts Italian traditions through the American supersize machine. There is enough duck-liver mousse in his antipasto portion to spackle a room — and to engorge a diner’s stomach before his meal has even properly begun. He spit-roasts pork in a thick jacket of skin with rosemary and sage, then serves a huge disc of it, meat and fat in equal measure. He covers a fried veal cutlet with prosciutto and parmigiano, then cloaks it in truffle cream above a bed of buttered spinach.
He threads sweetbreads and Hampshire pork onto a skewer and grills them as spiedini, with peppers, onions, sage and guanciale, the cured pig’s jowl sometimes known as face bacon. Polenta with wild mushrooms is a dish the size of a pie, and arrives from the oven the temperature of molten glass. It is all comically overmuch, a Pixar vision of Italy’s upper thigh, a place where everyone rides Ducatis down highways the color of egg yolks.
This theater of excess plays well to Mr. White’s role as an ambassador of Italian cooking. Walking the dining room in a gleaming white chef’s coat, he is at once huge and cherubic, a Midwestern football star proud of the skills he brought back from the restaurant San Domenico, outside Bologna, where he cooked for most of seven years. (His mentor was the chef Gianluigi Morini, for whom this restaurant is named.) Mr. White shakes hands and kisses babies, leans in to speak to customers, dances back to the kitchen to check on this or that, and then returns, arms spread wide, to welcome yet more people to the party.
It would be a hard act to maintain for anyone, but it must be particularly difficult for Mr. White. He is the executive chef of no fewer than seven restaurants in New Jersey and New York, including the more formal Alto, Convivio and Marea, all in Midtown, and Ai Fiori in the Setai hotel on Fifth Avenue, which opened on Monday. When Mr. White was present at Morini this fall, the restaurant hummed. On nights when he was not, trouble could ensue. Pastas that had been brilliant once arrived at the table slightly overdone, or wildly salty, or insanely slick with butter or cream. A grilled branzino, with salsa verde, radicchio and roasted potatoes, became mush on the fork, and tasted of little more than its texture. That veal cutlet, transcendent on one visit, was served lukewarm under truffle cream that had already begun to set — a paint bubble drying, no longer wet, not yet dry. A roasted baby chicken courted irrelevance, mere protein and salt, barely crisp.
Consistency matters. But with the exception of the hugely rich desserts from Heather Bertinetti, also the pastry chef at Marea, it is not a strong suit of the Morini kitchen.
The restaurant is riotously loud above its terra-cotta floors, a cheery roadhouse filled with food maniacs, scenesters and a few Actual Italians. There are hefty farmhouse tables covered with paper place mats, heavy chairs in various colors, and everywhere knickknacks and curios and hanging copper pots and farm tools, framed photographs, books. Save for the thin brick-face wall on the restaurant’s north side, and the harsh light of the partly open kitchen, it’s all very pretty.
Rock music plays — a mix caught somewhere between the one you’ll hear at Babbo and the one found on the FM dial during a drive across country — and efficient, knowledgeable waiters toil beneath it, patient with the madhouse scene. Carolyn Defir, Morini’s manager, runs the floor with grace and skill. Even when the room seems ready to burst its seams, even with every third person shouting and friends swapping chairs as if they were at a wedding, meals proceed in an orderly manner, amid much good humor.
There are bottles of lambrusco on practically every table. This frothy, purple wine is a signature of Emilia-Romagna, and the list at Morini — assembled by Chris Cannon, the restaurateur who four years ago brought Mr. White back from a kind of exile in Wisconsin to be the chef at Alto and Convivio, and with whom he opened Marea in 2009 and Morini in October — is rich in its various pleasures. For those who remember only the soda-pop flavors of the Me Generation lambruscos that once flooded the United States, a bottle of the Vittorio Graziano from 2005 will serve as an excellent starting place for a reintroduction.
It is a truth of the restaurant business that you cannot make any money unless you expand. It is a related truth that expansion is dangerous, because it can stretch a chef too thin. Osteria Morini, for all its good nights and delicious wine, shows that danger plain.
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He rolls beautiful garganelli, squares of eggy pasta shaped into quills, and cloaks them in cream and truffle-scented butter, adds more of that prosciutto and achieves the same result. He cuts wide ribbons of tagliatelle and serves them floppy and coated with a ragù antica: onion, carrots, celery, tomatoes, beef, pork, veal, chicken livers, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. It is Sunday sauce from some alternate world in which immoderation is only a starting point.
Mr. White’s pastas glisten with pork fat, with butter, with cream, with oil. They are aggressively salted. They hang around on the outskirts of Too Much.
That is true of almost everything on the menu of Osteria Morini, as it happens: of the fried Bolognese street snacks that can start a meal (little balls of molten béchamel, for instance, or skewers of mortadella, or squares of polenta topped with lardo), and of the immense affogato dessert (a cloud of zabaglione gelato, an ocean of espresso) that ought to end one.
Mr. White puts Italian traditions through the American supersize machine. There is enough duck-liver mousse in his antipasto portion to spackle a room — and to engorge a diner’s stomach before his meal has even properly begun. He spit-roasts pork in a thick jacket of skin with rosemary and sage, then serves a huge disc of it, meat and fat in equal measure. He covers a fried veal cutlet with prosciutto and parmigiano, then cloaks it in truffle cream above a bed of buttered spinach.
He threads sweetbreads and Hampshire pork onto a skewer and grills them as spiedini, with peppers, onions, sage and guanciale, the cured pig’s jowl sometimes known as face bacon. Polenta with wild mushrooms is a dish the size of a pie, and arrives from the oven the temperature of molten glass. It is all comically overmuch, a Pixar vision of Italy’s upper thigh, a place where everyone rides Ducatis down highways the color of egg yolks.
This theater of excess plays well to Mr. White’s role as an ambassador of Italian cooking. Walking the dining room in a gleaming white chef’s coat, he is at once huge and cherubic, a Midwestern football star proud of the skills he brought back from the restaurant San Domenico, outside Bologna, where he cooked for most of seven years. (His mentor was the chef Gianluigi Morini, for whom this restaurant is named.) Mr. White shakes hands and kisses babies, leans in to speak to customers, dances back to the kitchen to check on this or that, and then returns, arms spread wide, to welcome yet more people to the party.
It would be a hard act to maintain for anyone, but it must be particularly difficult for Mr. White. He is the executive chef of no fewer than seven restaurants in New Jersey and New York, including the more formal Alto, Convivio and Marea, all in Midtown, and Ai Fiori in the Setai hotel on Fifth Avenue, which opened on Monday. When Mr. White was present at Morini this fall, the restaurant hummed. On nights when he was not, trouble could ensue. Pastas that had been brilliant once arrived at the table slightly overdone, or wildly salty, or insanely slick with butter or cream. A grilled branzino, with salsa verde, radicchio and roasted potatoes, became mush on the fork, and tasted of little more than its texture. That veal cutlet, transcendent on one visit, was served lukewarm under truffle cream that had already begun to set — a paint bubble drying, no longer wet, not yet dry. A roasted baby chicken courted irrelevance, mere protein and salt, barely crisp.
Consistency matters. But with the exception of the hugely rich desserts from Heather Bertinetti, also the pastry chef at Marea, it is not a strong suit of the Morini kitchen.
The restaurant is riotously loud above its terra-cotta floors, a cheery roadhouse filled with food maniacs, scenesters and a few Actual Italians. There are hefty farmhouse tables covered with paper place mats, heavy chairs in various colors, and everywhere knickknacks and curios and hanging copper pots and farm tools, framed photographs, books. Save for the thin brick-face wall on the restaurant’s north side, and the harsh light of the partly open kitchen, it’s all very pretty.
Rock music plays — a mix caught somewhere between the one you’ll hear at Babbo and the one found on the FM dial during a drive across country — and efficient, knowledgeable waiters toil beneath it, patient with the madhouse scene. Carolyn Defir, Morini’s manager, runs the floor with grace and skill. Even when the room seems ready to burst its seams, even with every third person shouting and friends swapping chairs as if they were at a wedding, meals proceed in an orderly manner, amid much good humor.
There are bottles of lambrusco on practically every table. This frothy, purple wine is a signature of Emilia-Romagna, and the list at Morini — assembled by Chris Cannon, the restaurateur who four years ago brought Mr. White back from a kind of exile in Wisconsin to be the chef at Alto and Convivio, and with whom he opened Marea in 2009 and Morini in October — is rich in its various pleasures. For those who remember only the soda-pop flavors of the Me Generation lambruscos that once flooded the United States, a bottle of the Vittorio Graziano from 2005 will serve as an excellent starting place for a reintroduction.
It is a truth of the restaurant business that you cannot make any money unless you expand. It is a related truth that expansion is dangerous, because it can stretch a chef too thin. Osteria Morini, for all its good nights and delicious wine, shows that danger plain.
- Skinny 12-01-2010 9:29 pm