VISION LOCATION RESERVATIONS CALENDAR PLAYERS EMPLOYMENT PRESS SUBSCRIBE CONTACT US GIFTS BOOKS		November, 1999 The Next Italians by Jonathan Gold Two great Italian restaurants opened in Manhattan in the past year, places with extensive Italian wine lists, battered wooden furniture, and budgets sufficient to refurbish Yankee Stadium. Both restaurants specialize in deluxe versions of simple, smoke-tinged Italian country cooking. But one of them, Babbo, instantly became as much of a local landmark as the Statue of Liberty oo Grant's Tomb, reviewed ecstatically before the bubble wrap had come off the espresso machines, mobbed from the word go. The other, Colina, ensconced in the former pine-furniture department of ABC Carpet & Home, was greeted by New Yorkers with eall the enthusiasm they normally reserve for old college roommates who have just announced their intention to crash an extra month on the couch. Babbo was voted the best new restuarant in America by the James Beard Foundation. Colina, its equal in ambition, earned just a half star from "The New York Times," the "New York Post," and the Daily News...put together. Babbo is one of the toughest reservations in town. If Colina were a Broadway play, it would have closed on opening night. Of course, Babbo is easy to love. In fact, if you were going to engineer a New York Italian restaurant for dominance in the next century, you couldn't do much better than Babbo. The dining room, the former Coach House, is as close to a national shrine as there has ever been in th eNew York restaurant world. The propriotor, Joe Bastianich, of the Felidia Bastianiches, had previously retooled the casual theater-district restaurant when he created Becco and Frico, revamped everyobody's idea of what an Italian wine list might be, and he even makes Pinot Grigio in Fruili-Venezia Guilia. Babbo's Mario Batali practially vibrates in the key of Chef, writing a cookbook, beaming for magazine photographers, wielding his whisks so often on television that even people in Anchorage know what he puts in his zabaglione. He's instantly recognizable, Batali, a starched chef's jacket over flowered surf Jams, a sparse red beard, meaty calves pumping as if their owner were warming up on a StairMaster instead of sprinkling wild-fennel pollen on a plate of goat-cheese tortelloni. If you spend much time downtown, you've undoubtably seen his ponytail bobbing through bakeries, in teh newest restaurants, at olive-oil tastings. Batali banters with downtown merchants as if here were a neighborhood kid instead of Seattle boy who made good at his tiny Cornelia Street restaurant, Po, and he features their best products -- Faicco's amazing soppressata, Sullivan St. Bakery's splendid half-burned loaves, Florence's profoundly aged meats -- alongside fresh produce and his own wonderful homemade head-cheese in his restaurant. Like Derek Jeter or Sean "Puffy" Combs, Batali is seemingly everywhere. He is the dream chef of the MTV generation, with a reverence for the classics that seems to please traditionalists but a knack for rearranging the elemets of ancient Italian dishes like a gifted hip-hop DJ slicing an old Marvin Gaye record into something completely new: elegantly funky petals of San Daniele prosciutto served with spicy fig jam and slabs of oiled bread; hand-cut spaghetti in a tomato sauce sizzling with fresh red chiles and the strong perfume of dired fish roe; sweet, mild flakes of salt cod arranged under the freshest sprigs of chamomile and purslane; floppy "love letters," pasta folded around a vaguely Tunisian-tasting forcemeat of lamb, chile, and mint. Even the old trattoria stadby bucatini all'amatriciana becomes something special with the addition of Batali's house-cured guanciale, the legendary smoked hog jowl of Rome. His cooking, as it was at Po, is marked by an obsession with the sweet and sour frequences of the spectrum and a level of product fetishism that would do an Allure accessories editor proud. Grilled quail, for example, comes surrounded by sweet, crunchy sugar snap peas as tiny as babies' thumbs, pricey fresh chanterelles, and a puddle of sharp, sugary saba, a concentrated goo of unfermented Trebbiano juice -- prenatal balsamic vinegar, more or less, and so rare it barely exists. A light goat-cheese and yogurt flan, creamy and mildly tart, may be buried under a mountain of produce, but the clean, oniony flavor of chives shines through. Fennel-dusted sweetbreads rest on a ped of pickled onions fried with duck pancetta. Lamb's toungue salad with chanterelles is almost obscenely rich. The meat, which is cooked until it is practically melted, is arranged around a mound of nutty arugula, then moistened with vinegar and saturated with the yolk of a single, lightly poached egg. Cockles luxuriate ina spicy pink tomato and basil broth studded with sliced garlic and red chiles, the kind of direct, perfect dish you deserve (but never seem to find) when you schlepp up to the ancient Italian restaurants on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Calamari "Sicilian Lifeguard Style," a Batali invention that has probably become the restaurant's most famous dish, is an extraordinary balancing act of sweet and sour flavors brought into focus by tender, almost liquid rings of squid cooked only two minutes. The tinies little currants play off the chewy richness of Israeli couscous, pitted olives, paper-thin slices of garlic, tomoatoes -- each mouthful is different from the next, and it is easy to power your way to the bottom of the huge bowl. At Babbo, Italian wine rises to the level of religion, and the cellar holds bottles from practiacally every wine region of Italy, priced fairly reasonably and served with a reverence that even most wine-centered restauants can only hint at. House wines, including a delicious Roero Arneis Vietti 1998, are served not by the glass, by by the quartino, a full third of a bottle, and the waiters will split a quartino for two. When you order wine, even a quite inexpensive bottle, somebody will rinse each glass with a few drops of the stuff. Practically every red is decanted and swirled. And every bottle comes complete with a free, exhaustive symposium from either Bastianich or the wine guy -- "Just call me the Wine Guy," he says -- who is something like an oenophile cross between Roberto Benigni and Mike Myers's Dieter character from Saturday Night Live: tall, gawkishly skinny, and magically there when a customer so much as thinks about a grape. If you let him, the Wine Guy may explain a $12 quartino of Chianti with the same passion he brings to the exegesis of a $125 bottle of Brunello di Montalcino, in the least intimidating way possible. Does Babbo have faults? Of course. The roast guinea hen for two, which seems to be an eternal special at the restaurant, is really good, but it's a close facsimile of the garlic roast chicken you've probably eaten at dinner parties a few dozen times. The maple-mascarpone chessecake, on the other hand, just may be perfect.