Cooking Light Subscription: L Artusi Nyc

L Artusi Nyc

L’Artusi is the sister restaurant of Dell’anima, a diminutive, bar-centric establishment run by two talented graduates of the Bastianich-Batali empire named Gabe Thompson and Joe Campanale. Both restaurants share Thompson’s inviting small-plates Italian menu and the same neo-Regency décor. But at this restaurant, there are 30 seats at the long, polished white marble bar instead of six. There is an upstairs dining room (decorated, like the downstairs, with dark walls and white trim), which, on the evenings I dropped in, was being rented out for raucous private events. There are many more dining tables at L’Artusi than at the original restaurant (and therefore many more harried waiters), along with a raw bar, a “cheese counter,” and an amped-up sound system, which seems to grow louder and more intrusive as the evening progresses.

The first salvo of grub to hit our table included one or two decent salads (try the grapefruit tossed with fennel and honey) and a predictable blizzard of seafood crudi, like fresh, even melting escolar seviche (drizzled with olive oil and citrus), and little mounds of scallops speckled with lemon zest and sea salt. But most of the crudi (gummy tuna, refrigerated slices of salmon) seemed to have been prepped hours before, which meant the fish stuck to the plate. So did the beef carpaccio, and a bland vitello dish, both of which looked less like slices of beef and veal, respectively, than thin layers of mashed lunch meat, spread from a tube.Gabe .