What to order the first time
Marco Vitale, chefFebruary 20262 min
Order the pasta you cannot make at home. Order the vegetable you would not have thought to order.
People email and ask. So here is the answer.
Start with the bread. The bread is not a freebie, it is a course. We laminate the dough every morning and the butter is cultured by a woman in the Hudson Valley who refuses to scale up. There is a small dish of olive oil and salt next to it. Use both.
Then a crudo, if there is one. The fish list changes by the boat, not the season. It is the easiest way to find out whether the kitchen is having a good night, which they almost always are.
Order one pasta per person. Not to share. Pasta does not share well, the texture goes off. If two of you cannot agree on which one, get two and try a forkful of each. The agnolotti dal plin is the thing my grandmother taught me to make. It is the dish I would still cook if everything else closed.
From the fire, get the vegetable. People skip past the vegetable because the menu has a wood-fired branzino and a dry-aged ribeye on it, and that is fair. But the hen of the woods or whatever mushroom we have that night is, often, the best thing we cook. The hearth is built for vegetables. The fish and the steak are happy guests.
If you have room for dessert, you have room for the olive oil cake. Trust me on this one.
Last note: tell the room you are here for the first time. We will take care of the rest.