Restaurant Review: Jonathan Waxman’s Barbuto

When Chef Jonathan Waxman Opened Barbuto In 2004, the bookies of the food sector set high expectations for its viability. Since making Jam into one of the defining feeding grounds in New York of the 1980s and then losing it and two other restaurants by the end of the decade, Mr. Waxman had become something of a gun-for-hire, moving from from one consulting job to another. One veteran reviewer told me confidently, when I said the new location looked promising, “He’s leaving in a year.”

In fact, Mr. Waxman is still there and implementing his Italian cooking idea 15 years later, when a new homeowner bought out Barbuto’s building just south of the meatpacking precinct. chose to let the lease expire. At the time, Barbuto had outlived the dozens of nearby restaurants that received a warm welcome when they arrived, only to sink a while later. Barbuto never changed chefs or adopted a seasoning menu or went Nordic or eliminated meat or introduced a complex main course for 12 that had to be ordered weeks in advance or did anything else that made headlines. ie, although just About each dish publication In town take it that is turn admiring a half-roasted chicken under a shaggy salsa verde.

Until the last month, May 2019, when it launched a staff videos sing a stage goodbye to the tune of “One Day More” from “Miserables, ”Barbuto does very little to attract attention. It started its business with a cool and stable guarantee that if it kept working its way, those who knew the difference between heat and light would notice. Many people have done so, and they find it impossible, or at least frustrating, to imagine downtown Manhattan without Barbuto.

Mr. Waxman explicitly agrees, because his response to the eviction was to build a second Barbuto about 500 feet away from the first. After a short, bad time in February and March 2020, the restaurant is back in october. It is again located on a northeast corner, at the intersection of West and Horatio Street. Again, the exterior walls are mostly glass, although on the new site they are not rolled up, which makes the original space appealing on warm nights. Once again, the kitchen is organized around the fire of a gas grill combined with a pizza oven in a panoramic view of the dining room, where many of the same square tables, the same chairs, the same plates and the same a server.

The bar is now much longer, making it easier to drop in without a reservation and order a cocktail – be it the sweet Negroni, or the mai tai with a puddle of bold rum that you smell first on the first sip, or the JW margarita, may not be groundbreaking enough to bring out the monogram but is smoother and glossier than most.

Standard operating procedure at this point is to place a plate of green, brown and purple olives dripping with aromatic oils. There’s no reason to falsify that, but the spicy roasted nuts, fresh since moving out, go well with margarine and other cocktails with lime in them.

The custom also stipulates that at least one bowl of kale salad must appear on the table. Although this pile of roughage looked as if it should only be used for medicinal purposes, the clumps of greens had lost their intense raw quality after being thoroughly kneaded with a Caesar-like garment. Basil is almost invisible, but essential. This is One True Kale Salad, besides all the others are pretenders.

However, before you follow the custom, you should know that the salad of Brussels sprouts is lighter in color and more sunny, and passes its main ingredient through a process of metamorphosis that is also remarkable.

A word should also be coined for a salad that combines warm radicchio, crispy squid rings and spicy chili aioli with the same effect as buffalo wing sauce.

If none of this makes you particularly novel, it’s because of the style Mr. Waxman helped invent in California in the 1970s, at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Michael’s in Santa Monica, and then brought to New York at Jams in the ’80s, became kind of like the default for seasonal Italian food in America in the ’90s. Today, chefs does not attempt to faithfully reproduce the Italian traditions that are walking through the doors opened by Mr. Waxman and a few others. On the other side of that door are grills, shriveled salads, pizza toppings.

Barbuto has an avocado pizza and smoked salmon, an edible museum piece. Even the more traditional bun, some topped by Fontina- and stracciatella called Hannah, uses not mere tomatoes but long-cooked ragù tomatoes. Also why not?

However, there is a deeper flavor in the wild boar ragù that Mr. Waxman has been twirling the chestnut fettuccine with recently. In fact, pizza in Barbuto is often outperformed by fresh pasta, especially if your definition of pasta includes a gorgeous potato gnocchi – even though they’re not boiled, but pan-fried in butter and oil olives and then scattered like throw pillows. on a plate with sautéed romanesco or some other seasonal vegetables. Again, why not?

When it comes to main courses, there are several options but only one that matters: Will you get chicken or something other than chicken? Other meats and fish tend to be filled with vegetables that not only complement but complete them – sauteed cod with fatty, creamy gigante beans; Crispy, bittersweet pork cutlet with crunchy greens salad like a snowball fight.

The chicken came on its own, except for a spoonful of raw, rustic Italian salsa verde; arugula, parsley and other herbs are not chopped as much as chopped. Its clumps were scattered around the yellow, pepper-speckled skin.

If you find roast chicken too simple to eat in a restaurant, the Barbuto restaurant probably won’t change your mind. But if simplicity is a good part of what you love about rotisserie chicken, you may feel as though you’ve reached the pinnacle of simplicity, a naturally flavorful roast being the point, cooked to perfection. by removing parts of the bird that are almost equally juicy. And if you eat this with a side of JW potatoes, baked to a crunch that almost no other kitchen can match, you’ve got one of the best meals the city has to offer.

Heather Miller, the pastry chef, has moved to the new location with other Barbuto fixtures. Chocolate pudding, gelati, cheesecake, etc., her flavors are constantly evolving and improving, but it looks as if they’ve come together alone. This is close to the character of the restaurant, which she must have carried in her pocket after appearing on Horatio Street.

Meaning of the stars Because of the pandemic, the restaurants are not given a star rating.