The Alex & The Eleanor + 1

Italian. I wasn’t feeling the best going into dinner, which ended up being a great thing since I didn’t stuff myself silly. I really liked the chickpea amuse – very simple, probably very easy to cook at home – if only I had the time. I started with the special salad, which was very tasty with roasted seasonal vegetables and goat cheese, sweet potatoes and parsnips and turnips and carrots and potatoes and some other things. Simple, but good – the closest thing I have had to fall with the insane warm weather recently. I had a bite of Alex’s ravioli, very nice and plenty rich, even without the sauce. A bite (well, maybe 2) was more then enough, I can’t imagine eating a whole portion. For the main course I had the Stinging Nettle Parapelle with Wild Boar Ragu. It is in essence a very simple dish, something that is familiar and comfortable, just done exceptional well, with enough interest that its not plain, but not so fancy that you can’t recognize it. The cake we had for dessert was quite fabulous – I do not remember the name exactly, but it was make with the left over grapes from pressing wine. Wow.

The space itself is nice. Too loud for my taste, but its a choice. The design mimics the food in its philosophy. Its comfortable, and well executed, but not stuffy. I guess the music is the sort of ‘kick’ that makes it unique to Babbo, or I suppose Batali.

On the same night we went to Babbo, my office was taken to Buddakhan for dinner. Rough life, I know. I like Buddakhan, it’s my favorite of the big box asian restaurants in the city. I went along to have a drink and be social. The timing turned out that I left when they were half way through the main course. The appetizers were very tasty and mostly sized to share but the main courses were not substantially bigger, especially given how much more expensive those dishes were, which prompted one of the people at dinner to comment how ridiculously small they were. They weren’t really small, they just seemed it compared to the appetizers and what ‘normal’ portion sizes are today. Part of me agreed with him, and part of me wanted to make a snide remark about obesity in America. Its not a new observation, but it is still a valid one – Why is it the more you pay for a meal, the smaller the portions are? I think Babbo strikes a good middle point, the portions are not so obscenely large you couldn’t get an appetizer, pasta and meat course, but they aren’t so small that getting only 2 makes you feel cheated or hungry. (There richness admittedly helps in filling one up). Another instance of flipping history on its head – the stereotype is now the skinny people eating small portions of local, seasonal foods are the privileged ones (ok, so maybe they are skinny because of lipo, and they are flying to Italy for white truffle season.)

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