Rezdora in Flatiron Offers a Seductive Selection of Italian Cooking - Eater NY

Anyone who’s traveled the back roads of Italy knows that the cuisine changes every few kilometers, depending on quirky factors of culture, history, terrain, and agricultural geography. While one town may serve guinea hen on toast with a crumbly sauce of chicken livers, another on the next hilltop might specialize in pici in cream sauce with black truffles shaved on top. Indeed, local cooking is the rule throughout Italy, and the cooking of any given region is often just a collection of local recipes.

New York City’s regional Italian restaurants can be disappointing, though. Sure, we have Roman and Neapolitan stuff out the wazoo, with plenty of Italian-American and Sicilian, too, and Calabrian and Apulian spots here and there — but basically many of our modern Italian restaurants either display vaguely Tuscan influences, or serve a pan-national menu with dishes cherry picked from here and there.

Which is why the arrival of Rezdora in Flatiron engendered such excitement. In common with only a couple of other places in town — Osteria Morini and Malatesta spring to mind — it offers a menu anchored in Emilia-Romagna, a region that includes such famous food cities as Bologna, Modena, Parma, and Piacenza. Of it, Fred Plotkin writes in Italy for the Gourmet Traveler (2010), “From a gastronomic point of view…Emilia-Romagna is the most outstanding region in Italy.”

Rezdora means “grandmother” in the Modenese dialect. The chef is Stefano Secchi, who worked at Michelin three-star Osteria Francescana in Modena under Massimo Bottura, considered one of Italy’s best chefs. Chef de cuisine at Rezdora is Marea veteran Mark Coleman.

The new restaurant is slightly below street level, boasting a narrow, brick-walled room that’s plain but cozy. With its plush stools, the marble bar is more comfortable than most, while a leather banquette runs along an opposite wall next to a string of small tables. At the end of the room, the kitchen is down a few steps. Up a few steps discover a pair of tiny dining rooms, one with windows up high through which lush greenery can be seen.

Gnocco fritto, warm fritters and cool meats

One stunning appetizer is gnocco fritto ($12). I first encountered the dish in an agriturismo overlooking the Emilian resort town of Rivergaro. It consisted of just-fried pillows of dough, draped with local charcuterie. Cold culatello on hot fritters? At Rezdora, the charcuterie runs to prosciutto de Parma, mortadella from Bologna, and slices of fennel-laced salami of the type often seen in Umbria and Tuscany. Heat from the warm fritters releases divine cured-meat odors, which waft upward.

Other apps include a plate of cold cuts like lardo and proscuitto that makes a typical Italian start to your meal; and stracciatella, a damp and stretchy fresh cheese with raw white asparagus cut into crunchy cross sections. The dish needed a little more asparagus on the evening I tried it. On the other hand, you may want to begin with fett’unta ($5), which is simply grilled bread and olive oil. Don’t finish it, though, because you’ll need the bread later for sopping pasta sauces and meat juices.

A full meal at Rezdora features the usual three course progression, plus dessert or digestifs, found in an Italian osterie. But the restaurant concentrates on pastas, with seven choices, contrasted to only four secondi. The pastas include two versions of Bolognese, the sauce of ground meat that has traveled all over Italy, and indeed the world, becoming almost synonymous with Italian food in the United States.

Maccheroni al pettine, with a duck ragu

Grandma walking through a forest?

In Emilia-Romagna, the sauce is called simply ragu, and the controversy still rages over whether this concoction and the word associated with it is originally French or Italian. At Rezdora, tagliolini al ragu ($23) is attributed to Modena, slender fresh noodles in a delicate orange sauce of finely minced beef. By contrast, maccheroni al pettine ($22) flaunts a heartier duck ragu over thick envelopes of pasta like pointed and flattened penne. Which ragu to choose? Both are beyond excellent.

Proving the chef has a poetic sensibility, the dish of cappelletti verde (“little green hats”) stuffed with leeks and spring peas in a mushroom puree is called, “grandma walking through forest in Emilia.” The pasta is shaped like the kind of puffy hat Cosimo de Medici wore in Renaissance paintings. Other pastas I haven’t tried yet include a pasta called strozzapreti (facetiously, “priest stanglers”) with rock shrimp in tomato sauce. and a dish of spaghetti with clams from Rimini, on the region’s Adriatic coastline. I’m dying to later see how that one differs from the famous Italian-American recipe.

Secondi are offered plainly plated, and you probably need to order a side dish to make it a full course. On the other hand, by the time you’ve plowed through an amuse, an antipasto, and a primo, you may want to take you meat or seafood course without sides. Guanciale di vitello ($26) is a lump of meat from a young cow’s jaw that has been boiled and served in a lightish gravy. This is a very medieval way to cook meat, and one frequently associated with Florence. It bears no resemblance to cured guanciale, which is something like pancetta. If you’ve saved some of your fett’unta, you can make a mini sandwich.

With the chef waxing poetic again, a couple of pie-shaped pieces of sirloin well-seared but still rare find their way into the secondo called, “cow grazing in Emilia Romagna.” It conjures up pastures through a little herb salad that comes as a side, making this dish a very refreshing ending to your meal. And the Italian wine list, though spare, is filled with treasures, including a relatively inexpensive rosso di Montalcino, sometimes called a “baby Brunello,” available by the quartino ($22).

My two meals at Rezodora, now open nearly three weeks, have been some of my favorite dining experiences so far this year, and judging from the crowds that swell with each passing night, many diners agree with me.

Sirloin steak with two sauces

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https://ny.eater.com/2019/5/30/18640567/rezdora-flatiron-first-look-review-nyc

2019-05-30 13:19:20Z
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