Two For The Table : NYC 2012 : Thursday

Thursday, October 4, 2012

On Thursday morning, another cloudy day that only threatened rain, we started out relatively late, strolling down 3rd Avenue. Within the hour, a taxi had taken us to our lunch destination.

Lupa is one of Mario Batali's many New York restaurants. It's not technically in Soho, but it's close. We love Mario's restaurants and we love his food.

This was the third time we'd been to Lupa — all for lunch. Gerard Craft has a photo of his daughter eating pasta at Lupa on the wall of his new Pastaria. And while Lupa has various other dishes on its menu, for us, it's all about the pasta. These are the finest pastas we eat – time and again — and we weren't disappointed.

We had a 12:30 reservation, and Lupa was less than half full. This as opposed to ABC Kitchen which is at least four times larger and was packed.

We ordered a nice Barbera from the many Italian wines on the list and began the pleasant chore of choosing our meal.

We started with the house made salumi special and the veal sweetbreads with Shishito peppers.

The salumi was infused with black pepper and Sangiovese wine. It was not the rubbery tasteless lunch meat that restaurants often serve. It was perfectly cured and seasoned and disappeared more quickly from the plate than we would have liked.

The sweetbreads were easily the best I've ever eaten. I love sweetbreads, but they're often served dry and chewy. These were plump and moist and tender. They melted in our mouths and we wished there were more.

There were seven pastas on the lunch menu, the same pastas that had been on the menu since we'd been dining there. They also offered two pasta specials. We chose one of the on-menu pastas we'd not had before as our next course and an "oldie but goodie" as a final course. Both pastas were split for us to share.

Our first pasta was a cavatelli with squid ink, octopus, and clams. Each piece of pasta was bicolored, this accomplished by twisting together squid ink and non squid ink strands. We both agreed this was the best pasta we'd ever had. It was fantastic.

Our final course was a ricotta gnocchi with sausage and fennel. Each bite melted in our mouths, with the various flavors subtly exploding. We'd had this pasta before and I'm sure we'll have it again.

If you enjoy pasta, you MUST go to Lupa; you'll not find better pasta anywhere.

NEWS BREAK: Ben Brantley's review of "Grace" is out. Of course, we each put our own spin on it.

“Grace” isn’t as intellectually probing or unsettling as it means to be . . . And while all the performances are solid, I often had difficulty in believing these characters as something other than figures in a parable . . . There are a couple of lovely monologues of self-revelation . . . But there are also instances of glib, shortcut exposition you associate with sitcom pilots.

After lunch, we took a taxi to midtown and walked from Bergdorf Women's to Bergdorf Men's to Morgenthal Frederics to Ippolita to our apartment. And after a much needed rest, we took a taxi through the park to Lincoln Center for our dinner date.

Lincoln Ristorante is a relatively new restaurant situated in the magnificent Lincoln Center complex. Its chef had been the chef de cuisine at Per Se for six years. But this review is not about the food. It's about our dining companions.

Arthur and Barbara Gelb are one of the byproducts of my obsession with the playwright Eugene O'Neill. Arthur is the former managing editor of the New York Times. Barbara is an author and playwright. Their son Peter is the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. The Gelbs wrote the seminal biography of Eugene O'Neill, published in 1962, a new version of that biography in 2000, and they're feverishly working on a final volume — their pièce de résistance.

We first met the Gelbs in Provincetown in 2005. The photo above was taken at their New York apartment on the Upper West Side in 2006. We meet them there and dine with them at various restaurants whenever we come to New York.

Arthur and Barbara are both now eighty-something and they're physically slowing down. But mentally, they're both sharp, witty and delightful. When we're together, we talk about O'Neill, theatre, politics, food, family and more. Their publisher has extended the deadline for their final tome numerous times, and there's an obvious biological deadline. As we talked about the book last night, I told Arthur I was sure it would be a best seller. Arthur quickly exclaimed, "I don't care if it's a best seller. We just want to finish the damn book! It will be a monument to the two of us." Indeed it will be.

Friday, October 5, 2012