Review: Marea Is Still One of the City’s Top Italian Spots

Expenditure account dinners seem to be extremely much alive and nicely at Marea. On a new night at the lacquered Midtown fixture, tall, silver-haired adult males in blue blazers — the variety of guys who appear capable of firing a thousand folks ahead of suppertime — strolled through the place. A chatty private-equity dude predictably referenced Shakespeare and explained to me about occasionally extracting a “pound of flesh” from the firms he buys. Young revelers in button-down shirts, in flip, drank $25 cocktails and exuded the kind of self-assurance you’d count on from people who just left a organization-funded satisfy-and-greet with, say, golfing great Phil Mickelson.

But while these eating area regulars maintain at it, a transforming of the guard has taken area. Past calendar year Michael White left the team at the rear of Marea — long a single of the city’s most celebrated Italian seafood dining establishments, and household to the famed fusilli with bone marrow and octopus — prior to going on to a chef work at the nearby Lambs Club. All the fatty marrow stays, even so, less than the aegis of corporate govt chef Lauren DeSteno, the longtime commander at the Central Park South establishment. The fusilli — like so many other dishes below — is as fantastic (and pricey) as ever. Apart from the disappearance of, say, the famed brodetto di pesce and a couple of other previous staples, Marea in 2022 is not a whole great deal various from Marea in 2009, when it opened.

This past Tuesday, I uncovered a seat at the prolonged bar and cobbled with each other an advertisement hoc tasting menu: a number of bites of crudo ($39) and 3 50 percent-orders of pasta. Between the uncooked fish selections, DeSteno dots striped bass with mussel product and caviar, imparting the neutral fish with a wallop of oceanic oomph. She allows jiggly uncooked langoustines communicate for themselves with just a bit of chive and crustacean oil eating 1 is like popping a spoonful of shellfish gelee in your mouth. And she livens up oily hamachi with kumquat and pine nuts for a touch of fruit and crunch. In a city at present bereft of chef David Pasternack’s famed crudo — his coastal Mediterranean location Esca shut during the pandemic — this is wherever you want to go for Italian uncooked fish.

In the meantime, for those people trying to find out top-tier pastas, Marea’s alternatives go on to rank amongst the city’s greatest. Cooks however whisk gobs of bone marrow into a red wine sugo and toss the sauce with twirls of fusilli and curly strands of octopus. The marrow by no means dominates it enriches and softens the sauce, performing as a website link between the sturdy tentacles, the al dente noodles, and the tart tomatoes. Truth of the matter be explained to, although, I have constantly most popular Marea’s shrimp with gnocchetti, tiny very little dumplings with a Q-like bounce that are only faintly a lot less toothsome than Korean rice cakes. DeSteno bathes them in a mild tomato sauce that acts as a shipping system for rosemary. The dish conjures up an underwater coniferous forest, a magical location in which the seaweed smells of pine.

And then there are the squid ink lobster ravioli, a generically magnificent identify for a powerfully flavored dish. A bisque-like butter sauce supplies a concentrated lobster flavor, when the meaty filling in the ravioli dials that maritime taste up one more notch. A shaving of the crustacean’s dried roe, nevertheless, cranks up the coastal tang to a positively intense level of pungency. It is the lobster edition of a dry-aged steak.

You attempt not to feel about how significantly that ravioli fees. A 10 years ago a whole portion of the pasta was $32, a determine that slowly and gradually rose in excess of the several years. More a short while ago, in this period of rampant foodstuff-selling price inflation, the pastas have jumped up by $3 to $42 apiece as the cafe weathers price tag increases amid labor and offer chain shortages, according to a agent. So if you are feeding on a total portion of pasta working day or night time, you are now paying out above $50 right after tax and suggestion. Those rates are not out of line for a restaurant located on Central Park South’s so-called billionaire’s row, but the truth continues to be that Marea appears to be — notwithstanding clubby places like Nello — the city’s most high-priced cafe for pasta.

Most other celebrated Italian spots really do not even arrive near. Carbone in the Village asks $32 or significantly less for far more than half of its pastas Don Angie commands $26 to $29 and Rezdôra charges $26 to $33. All 3 venues, like Marea, maintain a coveted Michelin star. Other acclaimed spots like I Sodi and Through Carota by Jody Williams and Rita Sodi commonly talk to for $27 or much less for their personal noodle dishes. Then again, most other Italian places never occupy a perch in the shadow of some of the city’s most costly restaurants — a component of town where evening meal for two can quickly creep towards $1,000 and past.

Marea has also transitioned to an a la carte-only menu, nixing the prix fixe lunch, which was $67 just ahead of the pandemic. The venue has reduce its $128 established menu alternative at evening meal, far too. The very good information, even so, is that you can even now get 50 % portions of noodles at Marea, a courtesy not constantly out there at competing venues — numerous of which are a heck of a great deal more challenging to get into. People sizable 50 percent-parts, listed not on the menu, are $25 apiece, and they assist Marea sense like just a little bit of a steal — possibly — in this exorbitant community.