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by Manos Angelakis
There are over 680 Italian restaurants in New York City and they range from the sublime to the ridiculous. The majority offer Neapolitan and/or Sicilian style cooking with lots of heavy tomato sauce, because the early Italian emigrants came mostly from these two areas. Fewer, mostly upscale establishments, offer Northern Italian food. If you are a tomato sauce aficionado, like some of my friends, go to Little Italy in Manhattan; there are numerous restaurants there that serve excellent food based on the Southern Italian preferences. For more sophisticated food -- and less heartburn -- there are a couple restaurants on West 46th Street’s Restaurant Row that serve some of the most tasty Northern Italian food in the city.
Barbetta’s dining room has been, since 1906, an opulent venue. The dishes they serve are well made with prime ingredients, even though the kitchen is not always imaginative. It’s at its best in spring or summer when the garden is open. The black-tie service is most times attentive, but not always, and the ambiance can sometimes be pretentious. The cellar has numerous great wines, all at a price.
Becco has been a recent discovery for us, even though it has been in the 46th street location for a number of years. It occupies the ground and first floor of a row-house on the North side of the street and it fills up quickly. The nights we were there, at 7:45 the theater crowd departed and there were a few tables available for 15 minutes or so. Then it quickly filled up again, so by the time we left, approximately 9pm, there was not a seat to be had; reservations are a definite must.
 Becco serves excellent Northern Italian food at reasonable, for Manhattan, prices. Please, don’t let the all-you-can-eat homemade pasta offer become an invitation to overeat at the exclusion of other dishes. The tuna carpaccio appetizer was a fish-lover’s dream come true. Absolutely fresh sushi-grade tuna sliced paper-thin, drizzled with a virgin olive oil and balsamic dressing and sprinkled with coarse sea salt that made each forkful crunchy. We combined the mixed antipasto of grilled vegetables, tuna tartar, octopus, marinated bocconchini, baccalao and ricotta with honey, with a serving of sausage as a primo piatto. Finally, we had the four pasta dishes; and the pasta was indeed handmade. We overheard the table next to us describing the veal chop as “fabulous”.
Jeremy Ensey, the sommelier, has created an impressive collection of reasonably priced Italian wines. We had a velvety red regional from Campagnia with black cherries, vanilla and tobacco en buche. But, what really made the evening special was a bottle of 2002 Bracaetto d’ Acqui from Pineto. It is a rare find for a New York restaurant, a demi-sec sparkling charmer that was the perfect dessert wine to close our evening.
There is a bar at the entrance, but it gets so crowded with patrons waiting for their reservations, sometimes it is better to stand on the street in front of the restaurant. Again, reservations are de rigueur and even with them, on a very busy night, you might have a fifteen to twenty minute wait. An after 8pm reservation is probably the best bet as the theater crowd will be gone by then and the staff is less harried.
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