While the "hot" neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side keep the food media busy lavishing every scuzzy storefront with praise, there are other restaurants a little off the beaten track that offer fine food and far lovelier surroundings for a civilized meal.

 
IL PRINCIPE
Hugo Hotel
525 Greenwich Street (near Canal Street)
212-608-4848
ilprincipeny.com

   Il Principe is a stunningly good looking one-year-old restaurant in the Hugo Hotel, wedged in between TriBeCa, SoHo and the West Village, just across from the blocks-long UPS garage, in a quarter dubbed Hudson Square. Architect Marcello Pozzi has done a superb job of marrying the elegance of wood and industrial materials throughout, including the glass-enclosed lobby, the restaurant bar and a Rooftop Bar with a glorious 360-degree view of the city and the Hudson River.  The lighting in the dining room bespeaks elegant modernity of a kind you’d find in Milan right now, the walls hung with striking black and white photos, the soft gray fabric chairs are very comfortable, and in the rear, beyond a glass wall, is an ivy-walled patio that seems miles away from the city’s hectic pace, noise and UPS trucks.
    Manila-born Chef  Kristine Mana-ay, who has done stints at Waverly Inn and The Lion,  is doing a fine rendering of Italian classic cuisine with considerable finesse, evident in her silken beef carpaccio dressed with Parmigiano ($14). Bluefin tuna tartare ($16) comes with avocado, a pinch of peperoncino and some refreshing mint.  There is also a good pizzette ($18) of the thin-crust variety, with caramelized onion, fontina, a touch of thyme and a brushing of truffle oil.
   The pastas were all excellent, from veal canelloni—a dish you don’t see much anymore but should—in a light, creamy besciamella ($22, as a main course portion), and perfectly cooked garganelli with veal sausage ragù, white wine sauce and truffled pecorino cheese ($22).  Rarely will you find the Piemontese signature pasta agnolotti del plin  (left) on a menu this side of Turin, but, although Mana-ay’s are considerably larger than the traditional thumbnail-sized nubbins of pasta, the dish as a whole is absolutely wonderful, with spinach, ricotta and a dressing of good butter and sage ($17).
    For a main course I recommend the simple dish of impeccably cooked, flaky branzino with lemon, olives and capers ($27), or the chicken alla diavola ($26) with crushed peperoncino that makes this “devilishly” hot, potatoes and lots of garlic.  In light of all this goodness, I was very disappointed in a ribeye ($35) ordered medium rare, which came out barely pink and tasted more like pork than beef.
    The desserts don’t fall far from the usual listings, such as tiramisù ($12), chocolate torta ($12) and panna cotta ($10), but they are well made, and I particularly liked the flaky sfogliatina of caramelized puff pastry,  milk gelato, red wine-poached figs and caramel sauce ($12). Each dessert comes with a recommendation for a dessert wine.
    The wine list itself is of moderate size and very high priced, with far more bottles above $100 than below.
    I am always careful not to make too much of poor service on any given night, but, owing to the dining room being nearly empty, I would have thought more attention to the few occupied tables would be paid so that I wouldn’t have to ask the waiter to come over or ask if the wine I ordered was going to come before I finished my appetizers.  A busier restaurant is almost always a better one, so I hope this is the case at Il Principe, which deserves a wider audience.

Il Principe is open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Caffé Storico
New York Historical Society
170 Central Park West (at 77th Street)
212-873-3400
nyhistory.org/d

    The Upper West Side continues to grow in gastronomic clout but not, thank God, with the same frenzy as downtown.  Of course, you’d expect a restaurant set within the New York Historical Society to have a certain refinement, and Caffé Storico has plenty of that, fitting snugly into  the museum’s north corner.  Its stately windows let in the Central Park  daylight against  milk white walls and wood, a gleaming historic brass chandelier, lemon yellow banquettes, a marble counter, open kitchen and a window into the sculpture arcade.  At night (if they don’t inexplicably turn the lights down) the setting becomes soft and comforting.
      Fifteen-foot shelves are set with antique chinaware from the museum's vast collection, giving the large space a cheery, homey look, if your home was arrayed with such a bounty of beautiful objects.  The restaurant and menu were brought to the city three years ago by Philadelphia's restaurant maestro Stephen Starr (who also translated Buddakan and Morimoto to New York).
      There’s a new chef here, Edward Crochet, but he’s toeing the same line of light Italian fare,  and you can nibble on antipasti and pasta to your heart’s content and not make a dent in the entrees. The burrata ($15) here is as creamy as it should be, with heirloom tomato and a little basil, and the ricotta and chickpea crostini ($10) come as they would in Italy, with a thin slice of lardo. It’s a good idea to share the salumi board ($19) meant for two or three, with sweet fruit mostardo and grilled bread.
    Among the pastas the spinach and ricotta strozzapreti (“priest stranglers”) were tender and delicious, just touched with a hint of dill butter and sesame ($15), and the corn-plumped tortelli ($15) were very delicate, with chilies and breadcrumbs for heat and texture.  Lamb lasagna ($18) is the lustiest of the pastas, with bitter-salty broccoli di rabe.
    I’m not sure why this menu features tilefish with tomato dashi, bok choy and olives ($27), which seems out of style here.  The stuffed rabbit loin ($25) is very good, with fennel and onion mostarda, but the pork loin with shishito peppers, peaches and cilantro ($26) was rather dry.
    Desserts ($8-$10) offer some very good housemade gelati, along with a peach crostata scented with Thai basil gelato, and a richly satisfying coffee cake with dulce de leche and chocolate.
    At lunch Caffé Storico gets a crowd of visitors from the Historic Society and Museum of Natural History across the street, and at dinner an admirably local bunch of regulars.  Everyone basks in the radiance of the place, which is as expressive of what is so unique and very fine about a museum as cherished as the New York Historical Society.  

Caffé Storico is open for lunch Mon.-Sat., for dinner nightly, for brunch on Sunday.

  I wouldn’t call it a raging debate, but in Italy’s Piedmont region there are two schools of thought as to how to make one of its two most famous wines, Barolo, made from the Nebbiolo grape.  (The other is Barbaresco, made from the same grape.)
    On one side are the traditional Barolo makers, like Marchesi di Barolo, Giuseppe Rinaldi and Giacomo Conterno, whose long-aged wines have set a standard for big-hearted, mouth-filling, complex wines that are meant to be put away until they mature.  On the other side are younger wineries like Scarzello, Paolo Conterno and Cascina Ebreo Torbido, whose wines tend to be a bit lighter and are more ready to drink soon after release.
     Barolo takes its name from a Piedmontese village surrounded by vineyards, and the wine has been made as a dry, tannic red since the mid-19th century. As “The wine of kings and the king of wines” favored by the aristocratic families of Turin, Barolo always had a local cachet, and over the next century the Barolo production region was expanded to include five principal towns upholding the tradition of rich, highly concentrated, long-lived wines. 
      In the past, fermentation and maceration could last up to two months, so that in big vintages the alcohol level could rise above 15%. Those made since the mid-1980s in a more modern style emphasize softness over tannins and an earlier release time over high alcohol.  Traditionalists argue that such wines are thin and tend to oxidize more quickly.
  Somewhere in the middle of these contrasting but complementary philosophies is Damilano Barolo, whose reputation since 1890 has put it in the highest ranks in the region. The estate is now owned and run by Mario, Guido and Paolo Damilano (left), who have expanded it and brought in the most up-to-date technology to make their wines while always keeping a very careful eye on their family’s traditions.  Production is now 322,00 bottles annually, the most prestigious being the Barolo crus—-Cannubi, Brunate, Cerequio and Liste; the first two are considered the most elegantly knit and complex.
      Over dinner at New York’s Lincoln Ristorante, Paolo Damilano focused on the Cannubi cru (about 50,000 bottles), considering the wine “a big responsibility” and noting that Cannubi is actually an older name than Barolo, dating back to 1752; it means  “a mix of soil” in the local dialect.  “They used to `fix’ other Barolos by adding Cannubi,” he said.
  Damilano is not alone in producing single-vineyard labels. Most of the 948 growers in the region now do, and recognized estates have been expanded in recent years to maximize name recognition. But Damilano owns ten of the fifteen treasured Cannubi hectares (above), on a hill that stretches from the town of Bra to the family’s estate. The land has been subdivided into 20 micro-areas whose vines produce distinctive qualities that go into their Barolo Cru and the “1752” Reserve.  The soil on the hill ranges from sand to limestone, with magnesium oxide and manganese part of the terroir.
   At their modern cellars in La Molla (left), the Damilanos use only natural yeasts, with fermentation between eight and fifteen days.  Maceration is prolonged and the wines are racked, and the cap of grape must is pushed down to provide a robust body and tannins to the wines. 
  “From the crus we can have an extensive palette to make our wines with,” Paolo said over a Piedmontese dinner of raw beef called carne cruda with a gratin blue cheese dressing and toasted walnuts, and a fritto misto of fried quail, sweetbreads, chicken livers and lemon mayonnaise.  “This is what we would be eating in Piedmont right now,” he said, and it was clear how much more enlightening it is when one drinks the wine of the region with the food of the region.
    We drank the Cannubi Cru from the 2008 vintage ($100), a beautiful and intense wine that shows the rich essence of the Nebbiolo grape. “The harvests are getting later and later,” he said, citing global warming. “It used to be in October and now it’s in November.  And we get hail, hail, hail every year!”  The vintage was one of the latest harvests in a decade.
    With the Cannubi “1752” (also from 2008) we enjoyed chestnut pasta with a wild boar ragù, porcini mushrooms and Parmigiano-Reggiano, along with braised shoulder of beef with sweet parsnips, chanterelle mushrooms, baby onions and a red wine sauce—-woodsy, hearty flavors that were wholly enhanced by the power and structure of the “1752,” which is only released as a Riserva after seven years, at 14.5 percent alcohol.  Only the very finest grapes, from vines 40 to 50 years old that grow deep into the sub-soils, are picked, then fermented on the grape skins for 20 days and left with the skins for another 30.  The wine will spend 60 months in an oak barrel, then 24 more in bottle before release this year.  It is priced at $275.
      Damilano’s willingness to wait—-and therefore sit on a major capital investment—-is indicative of the estate’s commitment to the long traditions of Barolo making, while its modern facilities are intended to keep the grapes and wines as healthy and bright as possible.
      Paolo was very happy because his wines showed so well with food with which he was very familiar, declaring Lincoln the best Italian restaurant he had eaten in in New York.  His family runs a fine restaurant named Massimo Camia on the Damilano estate that specializes in similar Piedmontese cuisine; it serves several dishes quite like what he enjoyed at Lincoln. 
      “When you have such high quality of wine made with such passion and care as my family has,” he said, “you always want to marry it to food of the same quality, which is rare outside of Piedmont.  When you are as proud as my family is of what we do, we have to be patient.  We try to make the very best Barolo wines we know how to make, but also wines as fine as any in Italy or the world.”