![]() ![]() The menu she and Marzovilla have put together is straightforward Italian, with a few seasonal flourishes, but the restaurant’s modest size, and the focus on wine, give everything an extra, unexpected punch. The chef at Centovini is Patti Jackson, an Alto veteran and devout Greenmarketeer. Soon, my fellow barflies and I were picking at healthful portions of arugula tossed with hazelnuts, apples, and pecorino, and tangles of dandelion greens and fresh cherry tomatoes crowned with creamy burratina cheese. ![]() When I asked our garrulous bartender what he liked best among the antipasti, he said the salads. At Centovini (the venture is a collaboration between the owners of the high-end Soho design store Moss and Nicola Marzovilla, owner of the Gramercy Italian restaurant I Trulli), you can enjoy bowls of cialledda (tomato salad with chunks of rustic Tuscan bread) with your glass of ’04 Ronco dei Tassi (a medium-bodied Sauvignon Blanc, from Friuli), and slices of pecorino and piave cheese bolstered with ribbons of fresh prosciutto and speck. But with the arrival of restaurants like Masa and, more recently, L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, this long-neglected genre has been undergoing a renaissance all around town. It used to be that dinner at the bar consisted of a plate of oysters, possibly, a cheeseburger with pickles, or a boiled egg. A series of colorful handblown Italian chandeliers hang here and there like oversize sculptural artifacts, and they help to accentuate the feeling that develops, after a glass of Barolo or two, of a kind of intimate, even stylish coziness. The walls are colored in hues of gray and black, and the stools lining the bar are made of white leather. It’s a small-size wine bar, with a long white-marble bar for drinking these wines and a glass-enclosed store next door for buying them. As the name indicates, Centovini (“100 wines”) isn’t even a restaurant, technically. But as soon you get inside, it’s clear that unobtrusiveness is one of this restaurant’s particular charms. To find it, you have to pick your way past crowds of distracted shoppers and several pieces of earth- moving equipment parked along the street. The restaurant sits on the bottom floor of a bland redbrick building on Houston Street, near Greene, on the northern fringe of Soho. Centovini Photo: Brad Paris for New York MagazineĬentovini has been open for almost four months now, an unobtrusive little place in an unobtrusive, even problematic location. ![]()
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