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“La Bottega”

Occasion:	Cuisine:	Area:	Cost:	Rating:
Night Out	Italian	Chelsea	Moderate	Great

La Bottega, the bustling new Italian trattoria located in the swanky Maritime Hotel brings the latest restaurant design elements together. It is Schiller’s Liquor Bar meets Otto. Subway tiles, dark wood banquettes, ceiling fans, and a warm, blazing wood-oven give the place a hip, dressed-down, trattoria vibe. The place is already teeming with hotties—beefy Chelsea boys, slinky girls, and wool-capped metrosexuals. (Actually, there were an alarming number of people dining with hats on, snuggly pulled down over their heads. Enough with the hats indoors, already. Manners please.) Anyway, hats aside, chef John DeLucie (ex-Tribeca Grand) is doing a great job with the food. It’s a simple menu, with nothing that is breaking any culinary ground, but who cares. It’s trattoria food, it’s cheap ($8-15 for antipasti, $11-$14 for pizzas, and $12-$24 for entrees) and it tastes good. This is a formula I like.

Indeed, the reason there are so many ghosts at the Maritime hanging out around this restaurant is that the food is quite delicious. Apparently ectoplasm, or the manifestation of super natural spirits, has very high culinary standards. Seriously though, the food just keeps getting better every time I go back.

We started with a plate of puntarelle, a sort of celery meets fennel sort of lean leafy green from Rome that is in season for the next few months. It was served raw, shaved with a light and spirited dressing made form lemon juice, olive oil, anchovies (very light on the anchovies) and garlic. The puntarelle was a perfect way to start the meal, with every bite waking up a different part of the palate. We moved onto a delicious Robiola pizza, with a perfect, smoky, thin crust that was scented lightly with truffle oil.

After the puntarelle, we moved onto the lamb shank, slow roasted until buttery and falling off the bone, served in a terra cotta casserole with sautéed bitter greens and a creamy mound of toothsome polenta. We also had a pizza from the wood oven, this one was stuffed with Robiola cheese and drizzled with truffle oil, and a whole roasted branzino, its belly filled with slivered lemon and herbs and cooked in the wood oven so the sweet fleshy meat was moist and tender under a nicely charred skin.

The service has improved since my last visit, and while the crowds were there in usual numbers (Hal Rubenstein was seated at the table next to ours), there was a warm, inviting easiness to th ... [more, click below]

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Posted: December 6, 2003

Other restaurants in Chelsea :
+ Matsuri   + La Bottega   + Tia Pol   + Bombay Talkie   + Cookshop   + D'Or Ahn: THIS RESTAURANT IS CLOSED   + Buddakan   + Crema   + InTent: THIS RESTAURANT IS CLOSED   + Trestle on Tenth   + Klee   + El Quinto Pino   + Socarrat   + Txikito   + Co. (Company)   

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