The best neighbor
Borgo (Nomad)
RESTAURANTS • First Person
Hyper-contemporary but timeless? Casually upscale? Precise and balletic but flush with the warm, curative, unbuttoned felicities of great hospitality? A neighborhood restaurant, but: transcendent?
Andrew Tarlow’s been trying to thread these juxtapositions — especially that last one — since debuting Diner 26 years ago, and after that, Marlow & Sons, Roman’s, (the all-too-short-lived) Reynard, and Achilles’ Heel. In Borgo, which opened a few weeks ago on 27th and Lex, he’s proffered his strongest answers yet: Yes, yes, yes, and absolutely. Besides being his largest, Tarlow’s first spot in Manhattan is also his most elegant, accomplished, and by any reasonable standard, a resounding success.
In what was once I Trulli (itself a neighborhood gem of 25 years), Borgo features four spaces, starting with a barroom offering bar tables, barstools, and a few small two-tops for walk-ins. Beyond that, the first dining room looks into a backyard with a waterfall and a sculpture by Tarlow friend Gabrielle Shelton, with a second dining room running alongside it. Both rooms are dotted with well-spaced tables, mostly for two and four. Opposite the barroom, banquettes line the wall facing the kitchen, completing the horseshoe-shaped layout.
We were seated in the center of that first dining room, exactly where you want to be. Without streetlight or kitchen glare, it’s sultry, fun, gently lit by a chandelier of soft peach globes and most strikingly, by the beeswax candlestick on each table housed in a brutalist heavy bronze cube, also sculpted by Shelton — another study in contrasts. (Sum total, the vibe gives Stissing in the City, to be sure, but if you’re gonna tip your hat to another restaurant, better make it that good.)
Shelton also designed the stunner of a cart that’ll wheel through the dining room delivering tableside martini service, beginning this week. The wine list (by just-anointed Wine Professional of the Year) Lee Campbell felt expansive, yet tightly edited, and Campbell was on hand to guide us through it.
The woodfire-cooking-driven menu will also require some hard choices, especially if you’re a party of two. It’s broken down into five unnamed sections corresponding roughly to snacks, starters, pastas, secondi, dessert. Everything our two-top ordered from it was fantastic.
Start with the garlicky, herbaceous focaccia resembling more sesame pancake than the hardcover-book-width pillow you’re used to. Order it with gossamer ribbons of salumi, or the artichoke hearts and mozzarella, or anchovies — anything that’d go well with (or on) bread. My dining companion, already on her second visit, raved about the suppli (rice balls), but we opted for fried delicata squash rings dressed with honey and chilis — a simple early fall pleasure, executed to perfection. A main of tilefish with the season’s last Jimmy Nardello peppers and al dente chickpeas was delicate in texture but supple in taste, though the night’s big winner was the timballo. Rarely does baked pasta emit gravitas, and yet: The round of beef cheek, macaroni, and ricotta salata (famously featured in Big Night) showed up on most tables, as it should.
For dessert, a melon sorbet and a slice of pine nut tart felt like gilding the lily, but then again, we were celebrating: Like Zuni Cafe before it — hell, like Diner — Borgo has joined an all-too-exclusive club of big city neighborhood restaurants that feel around the corner from the world. It’s already hard to imagine a Manhattan without it. –Foster Kamer