Galloping Consumption

        The Palio is a wild and reckless horse race run twice each summer around Siena’s Piazza del Campo. Jockeys wield the whips of the competing contrade (neighborhoods), each with its own banner, colors, and team symbol – the rhinoceros, the goose, the caterpillar. The first horse across the finish line, mounted or not, wins the Palio (a painted banner). Injuries or deaths are not ground for prosecution, “unless premeditated.”

        Amazing, isn’t it, that this 400-year-old mayhem has inspired what may be New York’s most beautiful new restaurant. When Benjamin Holloway decided to gentrify Equitable’s new home on Seventh Avenue with spectacular tattoos of art, rotating baubles from the Whitney Museum, and grand restaurants – no matter the price – he didn’t expect to see the horse race itself. With some trepidation (“His work isn’t always fit for what you’d want in a restaurant”), Holloway commissioned the Florentine artist Sandro Chia to do a 128-foot mural of Siena’s Piazza del Campo – a skyline to wrap Palio’s bar. “I love Siena,” says Holloway. “I thought it would be nice to sit in the bar and feel you were in the piazza.”

        He was stunned when Chia’s work unfurled. It was the Palio itself – its thundering chargers, its rowdy riders, throbbing in hot sunset reds and oranges. It hits you like whiplash as Palio’s spiffily caped doorman waves you inside from the Galleria at 151 West 51st Street. Imagine Michelangelo commissioned to do the Sistine ceiling on a jewelry box. You may feel trampled and menaced by Chia’s heroics. Or you may be delighted, cheered by what restaurants have come to in the Drop Dead division. You may debate whether Equitable got its money’s worth for the restaurant (Holloway acknowledges having spent $6 million), but you’ll probably agree it’s a beauty.

        An elevator off the bar takes you up to splendor. Raul DeArmas of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the rich wood filigree, ordained light glowing through tortoise-glass panels. It is a setting with a hint of Vienna, an air of Josef Hoffman – everything new but designed so skillfully that the room has a dignity that seems to come from age. Massimo Vignelli did the graphics, the flatware, the waiters’ perfect tray, the aristocratic coffee service, even the uniforms (busboys in jockey dress, one sleeve green, one sleeve red). Vignelli’s service place stuns, too – it’s a magisterial brass round, the bright flash of each contrada’s banner centered in ceramic.

        In the beginning, Holloway offered the Palio space to Il Mulino, the hectic, homey Village trattoria. But it became clear that Il Mulino could not be comfortable in the sedate elegance Holloway wanted for Equitable. Matchmakers brought him Tony May, recently debarked from the helm of the Rainbow Room and the creative force behind Sandro’s on East 59th Street. In May’s pocket was Andrea Hellrigl, a star of the nuova cucina scene, restless in the isolation of his tiny Villa Mozart in Merano, near the Austrian border. Leader of the Gruppo Ristoratori Italiani in America, May is a fervent, passionate rabble-rouser. The invasion of “Continental cuisine” is a scourge to both men. They weep as regional cooking loses favor, and agree that aping the nouvelle cuisineastes of France is a tragedy, too. What the chef (now calling himself Andrea da Merano) is doing at Palio owes not the tiniest debt to France. If May detects the faintest taste of cream, he challenges Andrea, determined to keep the ethnic line pure. What has their glorious madness created? Thrills for the mouth, but many a stumble too.

        If fate and whim lead you to order well, you can have a sublime dinner at Palio. But there are clinkers languishing on a menu designed to intrigue the jaded gourmand with new sensation. You’re in paradise nibbling crisp twiglets of sage-and-rosemary-speckled breadsticks and heady olive-perfumed bread, sharing superlative carpaccio with tremulous scatterings of silkiest foie gras, then a risotto, a precisely simmered nest for nubbins of delicious quail wearing crackling leaves of fried sage. And you’re happy following all this with faultlessly steamed salmon graced by minced red olives and black polenta pudding – “gingerbread pudding gone to heaven,” as the Rocky Mountain Sybarite puts it. But if destiny is against you, the bread will be cut too long ahead. You may choose listless turkey in a tuna sauce, starchy little fusilli mundanely pesto’d, boring stuffed quail, and the sweet, watery crystals of Kool-Aid the house calls sorbetti. You may want to sue for alienation of appetite.

        True, no grandly ambitious restaurant can be judged fairly in the first weeks of performance. Time is needed to pull the kitchen taut, to edit out culinary miscalculations, to master the potential and peculiarities of American products. But you may resent playing guinea pig at these fairly stiff prices, even in this handsome laboratory. Tony May has repeated the pricing whimsy he came up with at Sandro’s. Everything in a category is the same price. That means you pay as much for lobster as you do for chopped cod and fried potatoes, and two could easily spend $90 or more, tax and tip included, even before the liquor license arrives. Of course, the budget-besieged will be cosseted here even if they share only a few antipasti and a risotto. And three courses with coffee, before or after the theater, is $27.50 prix fixe.

        So brave Sandro Chia’s riotous crimsons in the bar, then move on to the serenity above. Luxuriate. You won’t often find a wine goblet as thin-stemmed as this, or a water glass that chimes when an ice cube hits it. You may want to see which antipasti are offered on the house (changing daily) before ordering, so as not to duplicate. It might be snappily herbed chunks of snail, a roulade of eel on curls of chicory, slices of raw artichoke and shards of Parmesan, or gargantuan white beans so meaty it is possible to imagine you are eating steak.

        Very quickly – even as you swoon over the essence of olive baked into your bread – you will discover the chef’s personal fetishes. If an ingredient is naturally salty, as in olives or tuna roe, the dish will taste seasoned. Otherwise, it may not. Alas, he seems enamored of vinegar and shy with olive oil. Almost all the salads are too acidy. What shall we make of a sensibility that invests so much grace in the simplest roast breast of squab with braised radicchio, yet settles for (at Friday lunch) a bollito misto simmered till pathetically arid? I want to believe the problem reflects merely confusion and not a victory of intellect over taste.

        Besides the triumphs celebrated above, there is pleasingly tart radicchio soup that you’d swear has cream in it (May swears it doesn’t), powerful saffron soup with mussels (erroneously termed a “stew”), tiny baby squid in a savory liaison with chard, sticky ricotta dumplings (with only a pale hint of earth scent in the truffle butter) that are cozy and lumpen, as dumplings ought to be. At lunch, quivering mozzarella di bufala is celestial with artichoke and bits of porcini. Fettuccine alla Bolognese is perfect. That salt cod tossed with sautéed potatoes is the kind of peasant fare you’d be thrilled to find if you wandered into someone’s home on the Italian seacoast for lunch.

        The wine soup is bland – “baby food,” a companion calls it. And stuffed saddle of rabbit is unseasoned and dry. Herb-flecked gnocchi are fine in a mix with overcooked nuggets of frogs’ legs. Artichoke-and-olive-confetti’d maccheroncini has no pizzazz. If you like kidney rare, you won’t be pleased with it chopped small with parsley, and a veal chop at lunch is quite lackluster. But the dinnertime scampi is good, and the lobster in a perfect tomato sauce, though boring, is flawless. Those of us with a passion for polenta are not thrilled by these banal timbales.

        But wait… the cheese in the temperature-controlled trolley are impressive. As for dessert, a master blends the ice cream, intense chocolate and splendid pistachio; an uncontrollable sweet tooth is in charge of everything else. Luscious and complex is a whole apple – stuffed with chestnut, figs, and toasted pine nuts – on a pastry thin, the creation coated with cinnamon cream, stabbed with spears of bitter chocolate. Espresso-haunted chocolate cream is served with bananas and strawberries. A silken rice timbale sits on a puddle of two very sweet sauces – orange and strawberry. Lemon tempers the richness of irresistible ricotta-stuffed crêpes. With serious espresso or pallid and watery decaf cappuccino comes a temptation of cookies.

        Tony May is a hero of the Italian ristoratori on two continents for his tireless lobbying to preserve regional variations and encourage the public to explore a modernized cuisine. He and his activist brother are determined to codify their country’s cooking, and they have endowed a chair at the Culinary Institute of America to expand the curriculum. May’s so positive what he’s doing is right, he can be insensitive to criticism. Mention that Palio’s fare is often underseasoned: “The saltshaker is on the table,” he says. “No one wants to eat the old way anymore,” he argues. “That’s why we cut the gristle off the osso buco, trim it from the bone…Otherwise it is authentic in every way.”

        I’ll never give up the gristle in my osso buco or a passion for peasant cooking. But there is room for sophistication and finesse too. And once the flubs are abandoned, Palio will be true cause for celebration.

Click here for Vintage Listings Page.