when you want, where you want.
Our Patron Saint of Primi
Photo: Hugo Yu
Blessed are the pasta-makers. That, in a nutshell, is the message of Santi, chef Michael White’s return to the city’s semolina trenches. The name comes from an old saw of his former mentor, Gianluigi Morini: “Le mani degli chef sono come le mani dei santi” (The hands of the chef are like the hands of the saints). That’s what we call setting the bar high. But White, the founding chef of Marea and Ai Fiori, among others, delivers. In a ritzy alcove off 53rd Street nearby MoMA but nearer by the investment banks (Jefferies is just upstairs), White is back, turning out some seriously excellent pasta.
White is one of the city’s primi eminences, a man who has put his thumbprint on our collective orecchiette. After leaving Marea and Ai Fiori’s Altamarea group, which he co-founded in 2009, he might’ve settled into a comfortable consulting life. But like another of his fellow middle-aged masters, Andrew Carmellini at Café Carmellini, he’s decided he isn’t done with the kitchen yet.
White hasn’t retreated into syndicating himself, but he’s not running from his history, either. At Alto, his former restaurant in this same space, he stuffed agnolotti with veal, rabbit, prosciutto, and mortadella and bathed it all in a Parmesan fondue. Here at Santi, they are tortellini, filled with prosciutto, mortadella, and pork shoulder and napped in a Parmesan crema. They are a marvel, their bellies plumped beneath peaky little hoods, the finely minced, deeply savory interior almost shocking under its all-beige blanket of cheese.
When Santi opened in the fall, the menu had a number of big-swing, can-he-pull-it-off combinations that seemed as if White were trying to hit on some heretofore undiscovered alchemy, as he did with Marea’s fusilli with octopus and bone marrow. Those have since fallen away. I can’t imagine they were better than the newer, simpler preparations. Orecchiette, originally with seaweed butter, now comes with the more usual bedfellows uni, crab, and lemon; twisty busiate, once served with bagna cauda–like sauce, now comes with trumpet mushrooms, leeks, and black truffle. It could have been a vegetarian throwaway. Instead, speckled sooty black and so musky with fungus you may think it was basement-aged, it’s a treat and the restaurant’s best seller.
Besides his pasta, White is known for his seafood and especially for the assortment of crudos with which he opens the menu. A plate of raw Montauk red prawns is as beautiful a shingled composition as I’ve seen in a restaurant lately, dotted with adorable, cuff-button-size chiodini mushrooms, pistachios, and caviar — fresh and bracing as the bay. “They were in the water 20 hours ago,” my server bragged. Overcome any (understandable) aversion to an unholy-sounding combination of sardines and buttermilk, and trust the chef: With ricotta salata, thin planks of crisped sourdough, and summer squash, it’s confoundingly good. The only crudo I hesitate to recommend is raw bluefin tuna, piled with uni, persimmon, and green tomato, which is, despite its best efforts, short on tart.
There are some very nice dishes among the mains, particularly a hulking veal chop, but the cheapest of them is $49. For the money, I’d just as happily have raw seafood and pasta and leave satisfied. I enjoyed the roasted rabbit for two, but its bronzed saddle and lollipop legs couldn’t compare to the pea-studded dish of rabbit cappellacci served alongside. The only reason
I don’t say skip dinner entirely and try Santi for lunch, where two courses are $59 — just blow past the office guys eating cardboard-clamshell salads on the public tables outside — is that not all of the dinner-menu hits make it to the lunch menu. (At midday, you may also be less inclined to partake of the very good wine list, whose only downside is that it, too, skews expensive.)
Santi occupies a more piecemeal, cramped space than Marea or White’s old Osteria Morini. Its designers have worked manfully to cover up this deficiency, decorating the restaurant in haute-esoteric townhouse style, with gossamer drapery, unmatched light fixtures unexpected enough to look expensive, and co-owner Bruce Bronster’s own oddball art collection lining the walls. (I like the unattributed portrait of the 1960s matron with her blonde bouffant.) If the service at Santi is smoother and more attentive than at many expensive places around town, that may be because Bronster himself seems to be permanently in residence. I never visited Santi — not a Monday dinner, not a midweek lunch — when he wasn’t there, busily table-hopping even though, as he admitted to me a little sheepishly, “I do have a day job.” Gotta do what you gotta do. A saint is in the kitchen.
Santi
Pick Your Vibe
Ambience abounds: Airier around the U-shaped front bar, cozier in the anteroom and balcony, grander in the double-height back room.
Shake It!
Turns out Braulio, an Alpine amaro, is just as good in an icy, frothy shakerato as the usual espresso. Get either, or both, after dinner.
For Dessert
Of Francis Joven’s lengthy dessert list, the delizie al limone, a white-chocolate–covered orb of lemon cake with tiny flowers, is the most camera-ready.
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