DOLCE FAR NIENTE

Are we the last to notice the assimilationist trend among ethnic restaurants?  In the days of our youth, we could tell one from another.  Crystal, white linen, supercilious maître d’—it’s French, naturellement; red and gold—Chinese; downstairs—Indian; and so on.  In this orderly scheme, Italian restaurants generally projected a working-class or peasant image.  We could count on candles in chianti bottles; huge, cheap meals of pasta and tomato sauce; lots of garlic; fat loaves of bread; simple, zesty food in Brueghelesque settings.  Tuck the napkin into your shirt collar, talk loud, bring the whole family, let the kids run around, and give them a good smack if they get out of line.  Now—all, all is changed.  In the last year  we have dined in an Indian restaurant that looks like a wood-and-white fern bar, a Chinese restaurant that looks like an art-deco lounge on the Normandie, a French restaurant with hatch-cover tables and exposed brick, and no fewer than four restaurants in which the walls are paneled with ash, there is a brass railing in every spot where there might conceivably be a brass railing, and everything is bright, light, and shining, including the diners, who are well scrubbed and blond.  One of these ash-and-brasseries is Thai, one Italian, one Nouvelle melting-pot, and one Indian.  What’s happening here?  Is the tendency toward an American mush so advanced that not even the newest immigrants retain or want to retain any of their home-country stereotypes?  Whew!  Excuse us.  We may have gotten a little carried away.
    Dolce Far Niente is an example of a kind of ethnic restaurant that has sprung up in the last couple of years; it turns its back on moldy old-fashioned ethnic stereotypes and embraces fresh new ideas.  In this case, the dominant idea seems to be that nothing in the décor should suggest that the place serves Italian food, or that it serves food at all.  It is turned out in some damned style or other, but since we are a mere food critic we are unable to say just what style it is.  It is one of those styles that know no boundaries, within which tin is as good as gold—l’esthétique du mal, perhaps, or langue-en-joue.  For all we know, it may be International, or postmodern, or neo-something, or retro?something else.  Whatever it is, it includes jokes: a safe tipped on one corner, artfully peeling plaster,  and trompe l’oeil water stains.  One literal-minded diner within our eavesdropping range, recognizing how much effort had gone into making this place look like the aftermath of a disaster, announced, “I’ll have the crust of bread and the day-old water,” expecting, no doubt, that disaster décor called for mission cuisine.
     There are no chianti bottles here, but if there were, they would be broken, deliberately, just so.  There are definitely no checkered tablecloths, but if there were, they would be artificially stained.  We are dealing with a new order here, for new citizens of a new world, with inverted notions of trash and taste.
    Perhaps the neighborhood has influenced the décor.  Once a truck paddock, the area is now a spooky center of high-tech shenanigans.  Bustling by day, it’s echoing and empty at night, as if neutron bombs fell at five.  The buildings have been saved, but for whom?  Or what?  For little liberated animalcules crawling from their agar?  It gives us the creeps, or the willies, or the creeps and the willies, and we’re man enough to admit it.
    Ah, but here’s the surprise: despite the ridiculous interior and bleak neighborhood, we’ll be back again and again.  Why?  Certainly not because we were charmed by our waiter, a cheeky pup, presumptuously familiar, who clung to the obsolete stereotype of the Italian Lothario and seemed to be laboring under the impression that the name of the place is the motto of the staff.  No, we’ll be back for the food, the glorious, glorious food.  When food is this good it can be all an evening needs to be great.  It can make the most pompous and tedious companions tolerable, can even make them seem clever, amusing, charming—well, almost.  The food here is of that transcendent quality, from the crusty, chewy, twisted loaves of peasant bread to the tart sphere of lemon ice that comes unbidden but oh-so-welcome as an accompaniment to one’s espresso.  Most of the dishes are interpretations of Italian classics, which is to say that they have been altered at the whim of the chef.  Constant readers will know how wary we are of these chefs’ whims—often they mean that the “chef swims” in water over his head and, too often, drowns.  But not here.  The substitution of goose liver for chicken in an otherwise conventional ràgu Bolognese produces a richness of flavor and aroma so sensual it nearly makes us blush.  The surprising bite of the chicken filling in the tortellini comes, we learned after persistent probing, not from the cayenne we had expected, but from the Chinese hot oil, làyóu.  And oh-oh-oh those supplì al telèfono!  We figure that a half hour a day on the rowing machine will allow us to eat these lusciously gooey mozzarella-filled risotto balls once a month.  Scusi—time to row.

Dolce Far Niente
13 Bascomb Street, 555-3993.
American Express, Diners Club, Visa, MasterCard.  No checks.
Handicapped: easy access.
Parents: leave the kids at home; this is a post-stereotype restaurant. 
Dinner 6?1 Tuesday?Sunday.
Reservations required.

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Reservations Recommended is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.