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Nearly a decade ago, the chef Harold Dieterle decided to shut down his restaurants and, more or less, declare emotional bankruptcy. “It’s gotten to the point where I’m not having fun and enjoying myself,” he told Eater, in a 2015 interview. “I’m not saying I never want to return to the restaurant business, but right now, I’m feeling a little beat up and a little tired.” He’d won “Top Chef” nine years earlier, the champion of the series’ very first season, and used that momentum to open a trio of quite wonderful spots in the city, playing with different culinary palettes—New American, Thai, German—but all warm and welcoming and strikingly serious about their food. I still think yearningly about the duck larb at Kin Shop, rich and bright and blisteringly spicy. When Dieterle’s restaurants went dark, it was a real loss.
An arugula salad topped with fried calamari and chunks of soppressata reads more Jersey Shore than Amalfi Coast.
He’s back now, after a decade in the wilderness (consulting, mostly), running the kitchen at Il Totano, a new restaurant on the garden level of a West Thirteenth Street brownstone. The space was, for quite a long time, the downtown outpost of the bivalve-oriented bistro Flex Mussels, whose owners, the Shapiro restaurateur family, have partnered with Dieterle in this new venture. The brief is coastal Italian: Flex’s moody, slightly industrial interior has been overhauled in a riot of yellows, oranges, and lapis blue; images of assorted aquatic creatures—the restaurant’s name means “the squid”—frolic around the rims of dishes and on the walls of the rest rooms. Wicker-shaded light fixtures in the back dining room call to mind rustic fishing baskets; wavy blue-and-white wallpaper in the front room evokes the stripes of beach-club umbrellas. In the narrow passage that bridges the two spaces, which opens on one side to the kitchen, you’re likely to catch sight of Dieterle, stoic, focussed, running a stick of glowing charcoal over an orange fillet of arctic char, or checking the arrangement of royal red shrimp atop a yellow puddle of peperoncini-and-butter sauce.
Arctic char is treated with a stick of glowing charcoal before being thinly sliced and arranged over a celery vinaigrette.
At his previous restaurants, as on “Top Chef,” Dieterle became known as a technician, meticulous and controlled rather than expressive and freewheeling. That exactitude is most evident here in his lineup of crudos, a sharp and optimistic way to begin a meal. Raspberry-pink petals of bluefin tuna are arranged atop a circle of briny caponata; pale ribbons of Kona kampachi flutter in a pool of passion-fruit colatura; that coal-touched arctic char, sweet-fleshed and faintly smoky, is thinly sliced, the pieces fanned out over an earthy, silky celery vinaigrette, then topped with a thrillingly savory condiment of burnt chilies. Much of the seafood served at Il Totano is dry-aged, in a glass-fronted case near the kitchen. The process is similar to that used for high-end steaks—controlled moisture levels, quite a bit of time—though with fish the aging process is measured in days rather than weeks. The result is flesh with a tightened texture, and flavor that’s both concentrated and softened—a brilliant technique to apply to crudo, where there’s nothing for the fish to hide behind. It works just as beautifully when cooked: after a few days of Dieterle’s ministrations, branzino, normally a pleasant nothing of a fish, a backdrop for the flavors of its garnitures, becomes something complex and subtle, grilled to crisp perfection and served with an unctuous take on tonnato sauce made from tuna collar.
Much of the seafood at Il Totano is dry-aged, in a glass-fronted case near the kitchen.
Clockwise from left: calamari salad; kampachi with passion-fruit colatura; arctic char with celery vinaigrette; duck meatballs with cavatelli; dry-aged tuna with fried capers; grilled branzino.
Despite these bright spots, I found the over-all experience at Il Totano bizarrely off-kilter. The space, sitting a few steps below street level, is narrow and near-windowless; its low ceilings, tight quarters, and garish colors give an impression less of the lemon-scented hillsides of Sicily than of being stuck below deck on a new-money schooner. In fact, very little at Il Totano evoked the Tyrrhenian pleasures promised by the branding and décor. Not that it’s misery; it’s just not very Italian. The pastas are oddly forgettable, with the exception of the terrific duck meatballs—a callback to a Thai-inspired dish that Dieterle cooked on a long-ago episode of “Top Chef,” and which became a signature at his first restaurant, Perilla. It’s served with a scant handful of mint-flecked cavatelli, which, I assume, is what earned it a spot on this menu. In fact, most of the dishes I found exciting seemed to draw their sparkle from anywhere but Italy: that tropically inflected kampachi crudo; a savory and somewhat Teutonic fried pork cutlet under a tangle of bitter greens; a first-rate salad of arugula topped with fried calamari and chunks of soppressata that reads more Jersey Shore than Amalfi Coast. The cocktails are on another planet entirely: for some reason, they’re mostly named after kids’ shows from the previous century—Snorks, Wuzzles, Rainbow Brite. It’s the sort of forced, dated cheekiness you might expect at an airport bistro, not a swank new West Village joint with hot-spot aspirations.
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Italian seafood, a quirky Village brownstone, an iconic “Top Chef” winner’s triumphant return: the combination should be magic, or at least magnetic. The fact that it isn’t strikes me as out of synch with what I remember of Dieterle’s approach to cooking from his earlier forays—though it does seem more or less in line with how it feels to eat at the other restaurants created by his new business partners. Dinner at Hoexters, the Shapiros’ new Upper East Side brasserie, has the five-years-ago feel of date night in the suburbs; Flex Mussels (whose uptown location remains open) is a mid-tier bistro getting most of its mileage out of a food pun. This is, I suppose, more a matter of taste than of flavor. Despite their cringey names, Il Totano’s cocktails are solid, especially the Inspector Gadget, a sherry-splashed Martini that’s jauntily garnished with a caper berry. The plump shrimp dressed in peperoncini butter are tender and sweet (even if it stings to have to pay extra for the focaccia that the soppable sauce demands). The linguine with clams is textbook—tender pasta, briny littlenecks, garlicky garlic, salty pink nubs of guanciale—and that’s good enough, when it comes to linguine with clams. But everything about the restaurant, its successes as much as its missteps, points to all the ways that it could have been more. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
