475 replies to this topic

[bonitobroth]

It's the Fall Preview issue of New York magazine, and there's a profile of Batali's new Meatpacking District place, Del Posto.

It’s also a fact—at least in our crude, cut-to-the-chase estimation—that Del Posto, Batali & Co.’s new 18,000-square-foot cucina classica juggernaut, is an out-and-out bid for four-star recognition in a town where, as far as Italian restaurants go, three’s the max. Not that Batali or his partners, Joe Bastianich, Joe’s mother Lidia (of Felidia fame), and Lupa’s Mark Ladner, would ever admit it. There is no surer way for a star-seeking restaurateur to end up in the soup, after all, than to come right out and say of his latest masterpiece, “If this isn’t a four-star clam shack, I don’t know what is.”

More Fall Preview food stuff

[Orik]

“the ultimate expression of what we think an Italian restaurant can be,”

big, noisy, crowded, with horrible service, oversalted undercooked pasta, and lots and lots of PR

[Robert Schonfeld]

18,000 square feet and three stars are mutually exclusive.

[omnivorette]

Spice Market

[Robert Schonfeld]

Rephrasing: 18,000 square feet and three stars from me are mutually exclusive.

[Stone]

Adding a four ingredient sauce to pasta just ain't four stars.
And why waste a four-star restaurant on the tragically hip Meat Packing District? Those people want to see stars, not eat them.

[bonitobroth]

My office is in the Meatpacking District so I walked over to see what could be seen -- which is not much. It's just a huge, ripped-up raw space right now; lots of contruction workers hammering, welding, etc, but you wouldn't know it was a restaurant apart from the giant DEL POSTO logo that's on the construction barricade around it.

Interestingly, directly across 10th Ave (in back of Chelsea Markets) is what will be Morimoto, also enormous and in very, very early stages of construction. Batali's place should be open first, if the level of activity at both spaces means anything.

[Wilfrid1]

If someone could do me a favor and wade back through years of posts on eGullet (or OA), it will turn out that I predicted this.

[wingding]

I believe that Tom Collichio has a big space under construction in the same building as Del Posto.With Food Network Studios now located in Chelsea Market,I guess that the area will become FoodieLand!I predict an Emeril venture in the future.....

[omnivorette]

Is an application for a gambling license far behind?

[Rail Paul]

The resto is in its soft opening stage.

A fluffy three page commentary by Frank Bruni in the Times, and two conflicting friends and family opinions on the real estate blog, curbed.com. One cites an eG report.


Del Posto

[omnivorette]

I have one word for the potential success of this restaurants: tourists.

[Rail Paul]

I have one word for the potential success of this restaurants: tourists.

Another respected observer of the food scene described it as " OTTO for the bridge and tunnel crowd"

[omnivorette]

[bigglesworth]

Pretty good first meal earlier this week. The space is soaring and VERY spacious, a new concept for the group. The food showed to be very ambitious, not in an avant garde sense, but more stylistically. Actually the food is very classic in every sense. The place is just gigantic. Everyone was present as well, Mario, Lidia and Joe etc. Great energy! I anticipate is progression. BTW the potential is there,****, more a matter if it can deliver?