As
an independent observer of the New Mexico culinary condition, I've long
thought the most prominent delta in quality between restaurants in the
Land of Enchantment and those in large metropolitan cities are in the
areas of seafood, barbecue and Italian food.
It's easy to
understand the dearth in outstanding seafood restaurants. We
are, after all, a landlocked state some 800 miles or so from the
nearest ocean. While many New Mexican restaurants have fresh
seafood flown in frequently, it's not quite the same as having seafood
literally off the boat and onto your plate.
In recent years, the
launch of
Sugar's BBQ in Embudo and
Whole Hog and
Josh's Barbecue in Santa Fe has done
much to narrow the gap in the barbecue arena. This terrific
triumvirate has given us barbecue you can enjoy every day of the week,
maybe even more than once a day. We may not ever have transcendent barbecue like
Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City, but
the same can be said about everywhere else in the world.
In all honesty, New
Mexico does have some nice Italian restaurants, but there's a world of
difference between a nice Italian restaurant in Albuquerque and say, a
very good Italian restaurant in San Francisco or Boston.
A friend of mine has
taken a defensive stance with my assertion about Italian restaurants in New
Mexico, contending that you need not go further than Santa Fe to
partake of an excellent Italian experience. He's rattled off
several Italian restaurants he believes are on par with Italian
restaurants anywhere in America.
My ill-fated retort
has been that Santa Fe is where you go for Southwestern cuisine in all
its uniquely inventive and diverse deliciousness. It's not a
dining destination for Italian.
Fearful that my
opinions on Italian food in New Mexico would be influenced by a
pessimistic Pygmalion effect (a self-fulfilling prophecy that
essentially says you get what you expect), it took far too long before
I finally succumbed to Santa Fe's irresistible, siren-like charms and
visited an Italian restaurant.
Ironically that
restaurant, Il Piatto, reminded me of being anywhere but Santa Fe.
From the outside, Il Piatto's color pallet is stereotypically Santa
Fe--an adobe stucco facade trimmed with Taos blue.
Step inside, however,
and you might experience a sort of temporary astral projection in
which you might feel as if you're dining in a large urban area or
maybe even a European cafe.
Il Piatto has the
feel of a rustic neighborhood
trattoria in Italy with an ambience wholly antithetical to the stereotypical
Italian restaurant and its thematic red, white and green template.
It manages somehow to be both understated and elegant.
One wall on the
restaurant's front room is festooned with two maps of Italy and one of
the region in which Barbaresco, a red table wine, is made. The
front room has limited seating, but because all patrons enter and exit
through that room, it's not a preferred seating location.
The main dining room
is more spacious. Surprisingly even though the restaurant is
very small and tables are in tight proximity to one another, Il Piatto
doesn't have the sardine-can crowded feeling other small Santa Fe
restaurants can't escape.
The walls on the main dining room
are decorated with a few contemporary art pieces, but also with menus
from some of the most exquisite and exclusive restaurants in the
planet--France's
Georges Blanc and Napa Valley's
French
Laundry to name but two. All tables are adorned with
fastidiously starched white tablecloths.
Il Piatto is the
brainchild of chef/owner Matt Yohalem who plied his talents
at some of the most prestigious restaurants in the United States (Le
Cirque, Commanders Palace, Union Square Cafe, Coyote Cafe) as well as
serving stints in Paris and the south of France.
A mainstay on the
Santa Fe
Reporter's annual listing of top Santa Fe dining destinations, Il Piatto has also garnered accolades from such national publications as
Esquire magazine and the New York Times. The
accolades are very well deserved.
This is a fabulous
Italian restaurant with a sumptuous menu of traditional and
contemporary Italian dishes crafted with fresh and innovative
ingredients. The menu changes seasonally (as much as six times
per year) with several standards offered in perpetuity.
In 2007, Il Piatto
added another reason to visit--a prix fixe menu for lunch that
includes an appetizer, entree and dessert for under $20 a person.
If you opt not to partake of the prix fix offerings, lunch prices are
standardized: appetizers and salads are $7 each, entrees cost $9 a
piece and desserts are each $5.
At Il Piatto, pasta
making is an art form with each of several different pastas crafted to
perfection. One wall on the main dining room includes a
chalkboard displaying the specials of the day. This menu is not
for the indecisive. You'll want to order one of each.
One outstanding
appetizer option is Il Piatto's endive and radicchio salad with
roasted beets, goat cheese and walnut pesto. There is a lot
going on in this salad and your taste buds will relish each adventure
in taste appreciation.
The peppery and
slightly acerbic radicchio complements the tangy and earthy goat
cheese which has the creaminess of butter. Beets are an acquired
taste, and if you do acquire it, you'll appreciate how roasted beets
can taste both sweet and salty and the same time.
Both endive and
radicchio are members of the chicory family and their texture is
slightly more firm and crisp than lettuce used on most salads.
Together with the walnut pesto, they give this salad an interesting
texture.
On the opposite
spectrum, texture-wise, is a pumpkin pistachio soup which will
warm the cockles of your heart. In recent years I've become a
convert to the surprisingly earthy and mellow taste of pumpkin sans
pumpkin pie spice. This is an excellent soup wholly unlike the
dessert sweet pie.
Dinner entrees are
categorized into pastas (eleven of them) and pesce e carne (fish and
meat). The pastas are priced in the mid to upper-teens while the
meats will set you back somewhere in the twenties.
The gorgonzola and
walnut ravioli with sun-dried tomato pesto is a beautiful, albeit
relatively small, entree. A creamy gorgonzola sauce and
gorgonzola shavings give it a sharp bite while the sweet pesto imbues
it with contrasting qualities that meld so well. The Big Chief
tablet sized raviolis are perfectly al dente.
If you're of the mind
that grilled chicken has to take like the alutaceous rotisserie
chicken you might find at a grocery store, you'll be in for a pleasant
surprise should you order the lemon and rosemary grilled chicken
at Il Piatto. Served "stacked" with roasted potatoes and grilled
vegetables, it raises the bar for grilled chicken.
The vegetables--red
onion, garlic cloves and green and red peppers--are grilled to
perfection allowing them to retain a pleasant moistness. The
roasted potatoes are similarly prepared, r
endering
them tender on the inside.
As for the chicken,
it is juicy and tender with a nice blending of tanginess from the
lemon and distinctively astringent, wonderfully aromatic qualities of
the rosemary. There's virtually no skin to get in the way, just
plump, moist poultry.
Desserts are
terrific, too. On the plate, the sweet marsala zabaglione
just sort of lies there like a lump of mashed potatoes drizzled with a
gravy, but on your tongue, it will set off explosions of flavor.
I've seen marsala zabaglione described as "one of Italy's great gifts
to the rest of the world" and wholly agree. This is one
phenomenal dessert!
This sweet Italian
egg, sugar and Marsala wine custard is punctuated with an
attention-grabbing Balsamic reduction that gives it a sneaky tanginess
which melds harmoniously with streaks of dark chocolate sauce and the
sinfully rich custard. This may be the single best dessert
I've had at any Italian restaurant.
Another nice dessert
option is the chocolate and pistachio cannoli, served two to a
plate. Each crunchy chocolate-covered cannoli filler is engorged
with ricotta cheese and topped with green bits of savory pistachios.
On any other dessert menu, this might have been the star but the
marsala zabaglione usurped all the dessert glory. It was that
good!
Il Piatto is that
good, too--an Italian restaurant on par with the best Italian
restaurants in which I've dined across the country. It is, in
fact, better than the rest because it's less than an hour away.
It's the reason I'm kicking myself black and blue for not having
listened to my persistent friend's sagacious advice about Italian
restaurants in Santa Fe.
