DINING

Basilica in Hell

By Alan Flippen
Friday, July 23, 2004

Stand at the front door of Basilica, on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, and you can see at least five other Italian restaurants up and down the avenue. There are more than a dozen in the area between 42nd and 59th Streets.

With all that competition, you’ve got to find a way to stand out from the crowd. And Basilica, with its unprepossessing exterior and generic menu, really didn’t seem to. I had walked past it for years without going in.

I found three distinctions: two obvious, one less so. It’s the smallest Italian place in the neighborhood — they squeeze in 36 seats, but only by using pretty small tables — and quite possibly the cheapest. Most pastas are $10, most main courses are $15 and everything on the wine list is under $30.

To some extent, you get what you pay for. They’re stingy with the bread, and your meat options are limited to a thin slice of chicken breast and a thinner slice of veal, with only a few variations in the sauce.

And yet Basilica manages to punch above its weight, in a way that’s authentically Italian. An appetizer of mussels portofino consists of three ingredients: mussels, white wine and garlic. This preparation seems skimpy if you’re used to French or Belgian mussels with shallots, parsley and butter in the wine sauce. But it allows the pure flavors of mussels and wine to come through.

Shrimp oreganato, a special on the night we visited, turned out to be six smallish shrimp on a large bed of arugula. But the shrimp were fresh, sweet and grilled to perfection, and blended well with the mustard-and-Parmesan-dressed arugula.

The pasta menu is pretty generic, with preparations like garlic and oil, tomato, vodka sauce, carbonara, and sausage and broccoli rabe that you can find just about anywhere. This is the only restaurant I’ve seen in quite some time that doesn’t allow you to order pasta the Italian way, as a half-order before a meat or fish course.

So I almost didn’t have any. But a special intrigued me, partly because it sounded so horrible: pappardelle and chicken in a pink sauce flavored with Sambuca.

Sambuca is so sweet that I couldn’t imagine this working. But it did: the Sambuca added a bright licorice note, with the sweetness totally offset by the acidity of the tomatoes. The pasta was homemade and perfectly al dente.

Nor was it a fluke. Joey’s main course, veal napolitana, came shrouded in the aroma of porcini mushrooms. You wouldn’t expect these expensive delicacies on a $15 plate of veal, and in fact we could find only a few small pieces of them in the sauce.

But that aroma had to be coming from somewhere. So maybe they jazzed it up with porcini oil, but the result, like the Sambuca pasta, combined clear, simple and well-balanced flavors. You could pay twice as much in another restaurant — and probably get a larger piece of meat — but it’s hard to beat those flavors.

They paired well with the wine, too. The list is heavy on Chianti, which is notoriously unpredictable in quality, but our Terra Nostra reserve, from the great 1997 vintage, was marvelous, a mellow, light summer red with a faint licorice note of its own and well priced at $28.

Desserts were less impressive: generic Italian-American (cannoli, tiramisu, tartufo, etc.) and not well executed. Joey’s lemon sorbet was bright, flavorful and nicely presented inside a hollowed-out lemon peel, but was frozen hard as a rock. My tartufo was at the right temperature, but otherwise weakly imitated a Klondike bar.

The place was empty when we arrived, early on a Monday evening, but filled up while we were there. It was an interesting mix of three gay male couples, one (possibly) lesbian couple, young parents with a child, a few groups of friends or business associates. They looked like locals, and probably regulars.

That’s the hidden appeal of Basilica: The food isn’t fancy and the atmosphere isn’t distinctive. But it’s a very good meal for the price, and the kind of place to which you could easily come back often. The next time they have Sambuca pasta on the menu, Joey and I will.

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