CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Oh, My: Now That Was Italian

ON a Saturday evening at the restaurant Tommaso not long ago, the lights in the main dining room burned bright, glinting off mirrors and illuminating plates of chicken scarpariello, which someone at just about every table had ordered. The air was thick with the scents of garlic, onions and Parmesan. It was also loud with song — specifically, opera — but the voice filling the room didn't belong to Pavarotti or Domingo.

It belonged to Tommaso himself.

Apparently one of the privileges of ownership is a ready stage with a captive audience. So several times a night, Tommaso Verdillo halts in his tracks, throws back his head, opens his mouth as wide as a roaring lion's and lets an aria rip. It's thrilling in its way.

Scary, too. Mr. Verdillo's face turns as red as the sauce on the osso buco. His belly quivers. And you find yourself wondering about things you usually don't, like the response time of city paramedics.
You look at the menu of this Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, mainstay and you wonder a little harder, because there's no crudo here. There's fried calamari. Four-cheese gnocchi. A veal chop with mushrooms. A veal chop without mushrooms.

Remember restaurants like this? I don't mean the opera. I mean what it signifies: the fetchingly Old World corniness, the loving embrace of Italian-American clichés. I mean the food: linguine with clam sauce, clams casino, chicken parmigiana, pasta e fagioli.

I mean Bamonte's in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Pictures of famous Italian-Americans — Joe DiMaggio, Danny DeVito, James Gandolfini — decorate its walls. Gnocchi, tortellini and cavatelli all come with Bolognese sauce.

I mean Piccola Venezia in Astoria, Queens. Each white plate has a drawing of a red gondola on it. Romaine still trumps arugula, and a classic Caesar salad is the gateway to swordfish Livornese, with its generous, familiar cloak of tomatoes, olives and capers.

Many of the current generation of Italian restaurants in New York City don't have these dishes. While Italian cooking is perhaps more popular than ever, it now comes in the form of frothy soups with names like squid ink cappuccino (Alto) and date-filled raviolini so tiny they seem to have been assembled under high-powered microscopes (Jovia).

It draws big-name chefs with big-time ambitions. They join forces with designers whose flights of ostentation and imagination include purse stools (Del Posto) and green leather tabletops (A Voce).
These developments are, for the most part, happy ones. They have opened the door to painstakingly sourced ingredients and creative cooking that is in many cases truer to what you might find in Italy than a throwaway heap of shrimp scampi.

But every once in a while, as you peruse yet another menu in which the secondi are dominated by the likes of scallops with sweetbreads and you finish yet another meal with a provocatively flavored panna cotta, you feel a pang of nostalgia for the kind of restaurant that once defined many Americans' sense of what was Italian.

You crave a carbonara. You summon memories of your last Alfredo. And you ask yourself if you've lost touch with pleasures that were simpler and possibly sturdier, if a plate of veal Marsala, delivered by a 67-year-old man in a bow tie, might bring a kind of joy that Guinea hen with a cranberry compote can't even approximate.

At least that's what I asked myself. Looking for answers, I visited a half-dozen carefully chosen restaurants in four boroughs. All but one of these restaurants are at least a quarter-century old. All are the frequent subjects of lazy raves from people who really haven't been in 10 years and really can't remember what they ate but are really, really sure they loved it.

Of course these restaurants serve more than the hoariest classics, and they are not wholly divorced from the vogue for specialty ingredients. My meal at Tommaso happened around the time of St. Joseph's Day, in honor of which Mr. Verdillo had put a dish of bucatini with sardines on the menu.

My friends and I ordered it, and he stopped by our table to talk about the paces he had gone through to get it right. It required wild fennel, which is earthier, with a more pronounced licorice flavor, than cultivated fennel. But, he said, his vegetable supplier couldn't find any.

"I screamed and cried like a maniac," he said, adding that he didn't want to revert to Plan B — star anise. His supplier finally got the fennel from a relative in Sicily.

The dish disappointed us. While the wild fennel, paired with sweet currants, gave it tremendous kick, both the sardines and the pasta had been seriously overcooked.

The kitchen at Tommaso was a riddle, deft with seasonings, inconsistent with pasta, which was often too limp, and with meat. While the veal in the osso buco was luscious, the chicken in the scarpariello, anointed with garlic and lemon, was leathery.

But Tommaso satisfies any hankering for thick, lusty tomato sauces, which were slathered generously over the kind of rustic fare — scungilli, for example, and tripe — that many newer restaurants forsake.

A dish of pillowy gnocchi did not give equal time to all four cheeses in the sauce atop it, wisely favoring Gorgonzola. Best of all is Tommaso's wine list. Because Tommaso and its brethren have been around a long time, some of them acquired old Barolos, Barbarescos, Bordeaux and Burgundies when the bottles first came onto the market, instead of buying the wines at auction, for much higher prices, decades later.

As a result, you can find real bargains. At Tommaso we had a 1996 Produttori del Barbaresco for $65 and a 1983 Chandon de Briailles, a grand cru, for $55 — less than half the price it might be at a newer restaurant, if you could even find it there. Both bottles came from the kind of proper wine cellar that a restaurant in a prime neighborhood of Manhattan is less likely to have space for, so the bottles had a subtle chill, along with a coating of dust.

Manducatis, which opened in Long Island City, Queens, in 1977, also has a formidable trove of wine, though my most trusted wine adviser, who thirstily accompanied me, said it had been plumbed and pillaged more thoroughly over time than Tommaso's. We had a 1993 Giuseppe Mascarello Monprivato Barolo for $85, which isn't all that much more than the retail price of this wine.

We also had an enormous amount to eat. All of these restaurants serve much bigger portions, at lower prices, than their newer Italian counterparts.

A $16 plate of spaghetti carbonara at Manducatis was enough for a hefty family of four. Manducatis charges $18.50 for two thick, juicy, first-rate pork chops smothered in scallions and red peppers.

But its kitchen also performed unevenly. Eggplant rollatini were fantastic, the edges slightly burnt — a crisp, good thing — and the ricotta inside creamy. The dish elicited the response that I thought more of these restaurants would elicit more often: why can't this be on every Italian menu?

But that carbonara? Bland and gluey. A special of pappardelle with white beans also needed some sort of pick-me-up. Manducatis seemed to be in the spirit-crushing grip of a seasoning phobia.

In terms of atmosphere, however, I loved it. It's on a block with little commerce and has the nondescript facade of a modest house. Inside, the restaurant rambles on and on, from one dining room to another, in a haphazard way that makes you feel as if you are in somebody's home, a sensation enhanced by fireplaces.

Bamonte's is also on a street with little commerce, but there's a big sign out front that you can't miss. This restaurant has been around since 1900 and wears its age proudly. Although the cigarettes are gone, it keeps the vintage machine that sold them right inside the entrance. It keeps old-fashioned phone booths along a nearby wall.

In the dining room, beaded chandeliers hang from the ceiling and white cloths cover the tables. Tuxedoed waiters have demeanors different from those of servers at trendier restaurants. Their unforced smiles communicate genuine gratitude for your business. Reliant on regulars, Bamonte's and its breed know how to create them.

Ask the veterans at Bamonte's for recommendations and they don't hesitate. One of them steered us to the "veal valdostana" — a hybrid, more or less, of saltimbocca and veal Marsala. It had flavor to burn and, on a less salutary note, buttery sauce to spare.

The best sauces at Bamonte's were tomato-based, their subtle sweetness reflecting good tomatoes rather than cheats like sugar. In fact Bamonte's pizzaiola sauce, lively with garlic and basil, almost made up for the shamefully dry pork chop below it.

That chop underscored yet another flawed performance from yet another inconsistent kitchen. I got the sense that many of these long-running restaurants have been doing such a high volume of business for so long that they don't pause frequently enough to make sure that what's coming off the factory line passes muster. Maybe they don't need to. Nostalgic packaging saves the day.

Expert cooking certainly isn't what draws customers to Gino, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A sense of timelessness undoubtedly is. Gino opened in 1945 and doesn't appear to have been nipped or tucked much since then.

It still has that wallpaper of frolicking zebras. When the Yankees make the playoffs, it puts a radio, not a television set, behind the bar so regulars can monitor the games.

When several friends and I went, we noticed an unusually high number of solo diners seemingly over age 65, including a woman who didn't take off her fur coat and matching fur cap when she sat down to eat. Gino is their home away from home, capable of a pleasant veal Parmigiana and a sufficiently appealing dish of Italian sausages with green peppers.

But cheese tortellini in a generic cream sauce were hard as pebbles. Manicotti were mush. Tortoni and tartufo tasted like the mass market cellophane-wrapped stuff of freezer cases in corner bodegas.

Up near Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, Roberto has taken steps to modernize itself, even though it's a relatively young place. Open since 1992, it moved last year to a spiffy new niche with exposed brick walls and broad wood tables (no cloths here) and lighting that, in the context of these restaurants, is shockingly dim.

Its menu isn't so predictable. Farfalle can be ordered with a topping of sautéed cauliflower, olive oil and bread crumbs, or with a blend of three sauces: pesto, mascarpone and tomato. We tried the first, which was lifeless.

Stingy seasoning or dull ingredients undercut dish after dish. The broccoli rabe that accompanied sliced almonds in a risotto had almost no character — typical of too many vegetables and greens at Roberto.

In visiting these restaurants, I wasn't expecting the verdant, seasonal glories of the Greenmarkets. But what about full-bodied flavor? Or the special mouth feel of house-made pasta?

I found both at Piccola Venezia, my favorite of the group. This restaurant, which opened in 1973, doesn't have quite as much Old World charm as Bamonte's. But it too has bow-tied waiters, who wear red instead of black jackets, and white tablecloths. Beside many tables hang shiny plaques emblazoned with cherished customers' names. We found ourselves in Tony Bennett Corner.

Ringlets of fried calamari had crunchy outsides and bouncy insides. The Caesar salad was beautifully dressed, each crisp leaf carrying the same measure of salty, cheesy bliss. A veal chop was skirted with the right amount of fat and was tender at the bone.

Piccola Venezia did steady justice to these usual suspects and just as well with less ubiquitous dishes. Its signature pasta dish uses bow-tie noodles as a bed for mushrooms, Parmesan and grappa, a surprise element with more bite than white wine and less sweetness than something like brandy.

The restaurant's "buccolloni," which are tortelloni filled with braised veal shank, sounded more decadent than they tasted — a letdown. But pink-sauced pappardelle, cooked al dente, provided a reminder of how remarkable the unremarkable mingling of excellent tomatoes with rich cream (but not too much of it) can be.

When you think fondly of these restaurants, it's not because they have kitchen hands more deft or recipes more ingenious than their successors. It's because they trust in timeless formulas for satisfaction. They're not self-consciously showing off.

At Piccola Venezia — and, for that matter, Roberto and Manducatis — servers overheard my friends and me say that we were going to share. They responded by putting empty plates before us and, when they brought dishes to the table, scooping a little of each onto our plates, so we didn't have to pass the dishes around.

It wasn't proper, but it was what we wanted. And so, with a straightforwardness that sometimes redeemed the food's shortcomings, they obliged.

( Arthur Bovino contributed reporting for this article. )