{"id":74587,"date":"2025-12-18T17:28:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T17:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/74587\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T17:28:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T17:28:09","slug":"babbo-has-a-new-owner-but-none-of-its-old-magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/74587\/","title":{"rendered":"Babbo Has a New Owner But None of Its Old Magic"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Zeppelin is blasting once more at Babbo<\/a>. Though the restaurant closed for renovations only in early 2025, it feels as if it\u2019s been gone for years. Babbo \u2014 Italian for \u201cDaddy\u201d \u2014 had been, from its opening in 1998 right up until co-founder Mario Batali\u2019s downfall in 2017, a city-defining (and Batali-defining) icon. Then it wasn\u2019t. But Stephen Starr, the megarestaurateur who has been offering distressed establishments a spiffed-up second life (see also Pastis<\/a>), judged it worthy and salvageable<\/a>. The doors opened in November. The Prodigal Father has returned.<\/p>\n

Encore performances are tough. Babbo is inevitably saddled with the baggage of Batali, even though he no longer owns it or cooks here. The restaurant was made in his image. \u201cMario\u2019s vocal horniness had set a tone for everyone who worked at Babbo,\u201d Laurie Woolever, who spent three years working as Batali\u2019s assistant, wrote in her recent memoir<\/a>. \u201cDaddy\u201d was intended sweetly in this case: At the time of opening, both Batali and co-founder Joe Bastianich were new parents, but it carries the unfortunate suggestion of \u201ccome to Daddy\u201d now.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a reason to salvage it \u2014 and I leave it to the ethicists to debate whether it\u2019s advisable,\u00a0or even possible, to separate the pasta from the pastaiolo \u2014 it\u2019s that Batali\u2019s wanton indulgences could be as fascinating in food as much as they were execrable in his behavior. He was a giant of Rabelaisian appetites, \u201cknown to share an entire case of wine during dinner\u201d (this per Bill Buford, whose time apprenticing under him became Heat), and everything served at Babbo seemed selected for the most cranked-up deliciousness possible. The place was an ode to the pleasures of flesh. Then-unusual ingredients and combinations \u2014 calves\u2019 brains and head cheese, lambs\u2019 tongues and lardo \u2014 converted skeptics to omnivores. Even the temerity to throw the food pyramid out the window and offer an all-pasta tasting menu was gutsy stuff. I had it at the old Babbo once, many years ago, thrilled to get away with chasing pasta after pasta.<\/p>\n

Starr and his partners \u2014 Bastianich remains involved behind the scenes \u2014 know they\u2019ve got to rehabilitate the restaurant\u2019s image. This Babbo is not that Babbo, but it\u2019s not not, either. The restaurant has been renovated, but it still looks much as it did with grand marble-topped tables in the center of both the upstairs and downstairs dining rooms, not to seat guests but to set the scene, heavy with bowls of walnuts and bottles of wine as in a Baroque still life. Mark Ladner, a Batali prot\u00e9g\u00e9, runs the kitchen, and so many old recipes are on the menu that royalties may be in order. The famous \u201cmint love letters\u201d (little envelopes of pasta filled with ricotta and mint) have cycled off, but the old \u201cSicilian lifeguard style\u201d calamari calamarata (squid and squid-shaped pasta in a kind of alt-puttanesca) remains, as does the beef-cheek ravioli with chicken liver and truffle. Even dishes initially left in the archives have been revived: A shrimp-and-squid-ink spaghetti, slicked with Calabrian sausage, was added to the menu after Babbo old-timers demanded it.<\/p>\n

Those old-timers seem to be returning in force, judging from two recent visits. The crowd was grayer and better seasoned than is usual for a noisy new restaurant. We watched a clutch of necktied white guys descend the stairs. \u201cThis is like The Devil\u2019s Advocate,\u201d a guest of mine whispered. Ladner has taken on the seigneurial role, spending less time in the kitchen and more on the floor, greeting guests, crushing pesto in a marble mortar (\u201cCarrara marble, from Carrara,\u201d he said), and presenting his \u201cDetroit-style\u201d lasagna for four like a catch of the day before it is quartered and served.<\/p>\n

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\n Clockwise from top left: Outside, lobster busiate, the refreshed dining room, blueberry and blue-cheese budino. Hugo Yu.\n <\/p>\n

\n Clockwise from top left: Outside, lobster busiate, the refreshed dining room, blueberry and blue-cheese budino. Hugo Yu.\n <\/p>\n

I wanted to like Babbo. The space is the space, and it is lovely, a relic of Henry James\u2019s Washington Square. (\u201cCarpeted!\u201d another guest of mine cooed.) Pasta is an easy sell, and Babbo once made some of the best. So why did this revival thud so dully for me? It\u2019s not that I wish for a permanent purgatory for the restaurant or even the recipes. Classics in New York live many lives, and there are plenty of landmarks (B&H Dairy<\/a> to Le Veau d\u2019Or<\/a>) thriving in revival mode. But the intensity of this Babbo\u00a0lacks the vibrancy and surprise that made the original great.<\/p>\n

The voluptuous combinations that were eye-opening in 2000 are heavy, and heavy-handed, in 2025. Dishes suffer from an odd, imbalance, the star relegated to the sidelines. The beef in the beef-cheek ravioli was wan and dry but barely needed to be there at all, so aggressive were the crushed liver and black truffle vying for dominance. That lifeguard\u2019s pasta had a nice olive-and-pepper piquancy, salty-hot, but the calamari was irrelevant. Same for the shrimp in what is nominally a black spaghetti with shrimp: Between the saltiness of the squid-ink pasta and the greasiness of noodle-coating salami, the shrimp came to feel like exiles from an offstage pupu platter.<\/p>\n

Were these dishes better the first time around, or is that a trick of memory? A peril of being influential is that everyone else eventually catches up. I wish Babbo could ascend from flesh to spirit. The idea of being playful, heretical, esoteric with Italian food: That\u2019s an excellent ethos and guiding principle. Read Babbo as a creed, not a cookbook. That\u2019s what other chefs who are clearly working in a Babbo mold are doing. Carlo Mirarchi was serving veal-innard tortellini in Amaretto at Foul Witch<\/a> until it closed in November, and nothing I ate at the new Babbo gave me the confused thrill a dish like that did.<\/p>\n

Instead, there\u2019s a \u201cpuntarelle style\u201d celery Caesar whose \u201cBabbo breadsticks\u201d were actually toasted crusts that looked sheared off a sandwich, giving the whole thing the taste and vibe of a garlicky compost bin. Ladner\u2019s lasagna seems intended to prick at the prissiness of fine-dining norms, but its \u201cDetroit\u201d-ness is a charred crust so chewy that all four people at my table (myself included) left half of it on our plates. To give credit where it is due, I enjoyed \u201c49-day minestrone\u201d (made \u201csolera style,\u201d like sherry, with batches layered onto one another for richness), which is imbued with as much earthy flavor into a vegan soup as I think is possible to achieve. Among the pastas, rabbit-cacciatore cavatelli was my favorite, sweet and mild.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s absolutely possible to have a good meal at Babbo, but at prices like these \u2014 $45 for lobster busiate or beef-cheek ravioli, $82 for lamb chops, $100 for the lasagna \u2014 the chances of that happening should not come down to luck. There are too many traps and hazards, too many opportunities to go off course. Beef rib cap is gilded with umami-rich espresso-porcini butter, but serving it in long, thin strips gives the luxurious, $84 meat an air of brisket. Skip the swordfish Milanese, fish-stick couture.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t much care for the food at Babbo, but I did love the ambience, the long slow unfurling of a meal in regal rooms of yore, the silver nutcracker placed on the table at the night\u2019s end with a handful of unshelled walnuts to crack and mine and nibble alongside an espresso, some sorbetto, the gelato. The scene is much as it was, though the upstairs dining room has been repainted in a dark oxblood red and the windows covered up. Here, sealed off from the outside world, time seems to stand still. \u201cWe call it the casino,\u201d a manager confirmed. That\u2019s seductive. It\u2019s dangerous, too.<\/p>\n

\n Scratchpad\n <\/p>\n

Babbo<\/p>\n

110 Waverly Pl., nr. Washington Sq. W.; babbonyc.com<\/p>\n

The Wine\u2019s Good
The bottle list, thanks to the long-running cellar, is Italo-comprehensive, and there are bargains to be had among the older offerings.<\/p>\n

Where to Sit?
Upstairs or down? I\u2019d go up, both for the cozier quiet and the opportunity to descend the staircase at the end, lord of all you survey.<\/p>\n

Dessert Isn\u2019t a Must
Try as I might, I never found a composed dessert that delighted me. I did prefer a chocolate olive-oil cake to a blueberry blue-cheese budino with a salty crust.<\/p>\n

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