It’s Friday night in Chelsea and the women with beautifully gelled eyebrows and sequin boleros are flagging down the salami cart.
This isn’t a euphemism: In the gleaming dining rooms of La Sirena,
the latest restaurant from celebrity chef Mario Batali and his partner
Joe Bastianich, there’s a roving antipasti station delivering piles of
olives, cheese, and salami. It’s one of the successful elements of this
new diadem of the Maritime Hotel, which has drawn crowds since the
restaurant opened in February.
La
Sirena’s combined dining rooms and lounge—all white tile and
echoed yelps—can seat 200 people. On most nights they do, with dozens
more standing by the packed bar, sipping amaro-darkened cocktails, or
leaning in the doorway to the hotel lobby, arguing on the phone with
their nannies and their dealers. When the weather is good, the waiters
push La Sirena’s floor-to-ceiling windows open onto the terrace, so
while you work on a ricotta-filled orb of mozzarella, you can catch the
occasional whiffs of weed and cigarette smoke from club-goers drifting
from velvet rope to velvet rope. Soon, weather permitting, 100 seats
will be added to the terrace, along with a crudité and bagna cauda cart.
It'll be a good place to sip a spritz on a slow, sunny afternoon.
The
menu at La Sirena is Italian, but in a more general way than chef Josh
Laurano's prior joint, Lupa (which cooks Roman food). There’s a long
list here of antipasti, pastas, and a range of entrees that include
things you’d expect, such as a fish for two and a steak for two. All the
pasta, with the exception of a dried bucatini, is made in house, and
one of the best is the pici, a perfectly fat, hand-rolled spaghetti that
tapers off at the ends. It’s served in a rich, slippery sauce of pork
sausage and escarole, and it’s the kind of dish that can send you into a
fugue state, eating nonstop, forgetting your wine, your friends, your
white shirt, yourself, until your plate is nearly clean.
There aren’t quite enough dishes that do that at La Sirena,
though there are lovely marinated anchovies draped over croutons with
paper-thin slices of fennel, and juicy clams under deeply golden
breadcrumbs. Laurano serves those with slices of quick-salted lemon
preserved in olive oil and a fantastic chili sauce. The only complaint
you might have here is that for $17, maybe there should be more than
seven clams.
But
fullness isn’t the only way to measure satisfaction. You go to La
Sirena with an appetite for the kind of burly Italian cooking you’ve
come to expect from Batali, as well as for the glamour. The crowd is
wealthy and well-dressed and wants to be seen. Maybe you’d catch more
celebrities walking through the bar (hey, isn’t that the guy who played
Charlotte’s wedding planner on Sex and the City?), if it weren’t so crowded.
On Tuesday nights, fried sweetbreads alla diavola are
cheekily served “Buffalo-style” because they come with a little braised
and raw celery. The sweetbreads are crisp and sweet in pools of a
vicious-looking sauce that really scorches with the intense fire of
Calabrian chilis. On the other end of the heat spectrum, a delicious
white lasagna is all comforting, squishy blandness in a stack of
super-soft potato, milk sauce, and cheese, as if made to thrill a few
small and exceptionally picky children. An Amatriciana ravioli is
simple, with a filling that’s pared down to the classic sauce’s
essentials of guanciale and its rendered fat, lovingly holding together
the red onion, tomato, and pecorino. It’s delicious under a splat spring
onion butter.
Service
is polite, going through all the choreography of hospitality but too
often without the energy or enthusiasm required to make it convincing.
La Sirena certainly looks like the kind of restaurant where dinner is a
glamorous occasion, but it doesn’t always feel like it. On one occasion,
the ribs of caserecce, in a salty puree of broccoli raab, were so
waterlogged and banged up, half of them had split open. It was a rare
misstep, but it registered: The restaurant is expensive and has gone in
on white tablecloths and sharply dressed servers that set expectations
high.
Dessert
meets them. Michael Laiskonis, previously the pastry chef at Le
Bernardin and currently creative director of the Institute of Culinary
Education, is responsible for them. Don’t miss the pine nut tart, which
resembles a fluffy pecan pie, full of flavor without any of the goopy,
sugary sludge.
By the end of the night, you’ll have noticed the pattern
running through La Sirena’s design. The votive candleholder matches the
tiled floor in the bar matches the paper under your tiny espresso with a
sidecar of whipped cream. Like La Sirena, it's fun and very pretty, in a
matchy-matchy kind of way.
Post a Comment