When you’re hot you’re hot, and at the moment the Buona Notte on St. Laurent Blvd. is undoubtedly the hottest item on the restaurant scene. How can you tell? Well, it isn’t easy if you’re over 30, because by then, if you get out at all you have developed a taste, either for small and cozy or for elegant and pricey. And if you have to read about it, or have your 20-year-old tell you about it, you probably won’t feel comfortable there anyway.
The young – and I’m talking late teens and 20s – seem to learn about these places by osmosis, or else have some sort of bat-like radar that leads them there before the paint is dry on the walls and long before advertising or critics inform the rest of the world.
If you really care, of course, you can cruise along the popular restaurant streets, St. Laurent Blvd. in particular, and look for lineups. Wherever there’s a lineup, there’s something hot.
But if it’s food you’re after, take a close look – you may end up in the latest “in” club (read bar) or strip joint.
We arrived at the Buona Notte all unsuspecting, having received a notice of the opening and hoping to find a nice, cozy Italian restaurant (we’re definitely into small and cozy).
We were early and there was no lineup but inside the huge barn of a place things were already heating up. We were lucky to get one of the last unreserved tables. Half an hour later, they were lining up four or five deep at the large, horseshore bar.
“It’s been this way since we opened just before Christmas,” said harried but ecstatic chef Mateo Yacoub, when he recognized me near the end of the evening. I had met him a year or so ago when he was chef at Outremont’s Porta d’Italia.
When I spoke to him this week by telephone, it was his first day off since the opening, not counting last Monday when the whole staff were guests at the U2 concert, front-row seats, after the rock group commandeered the restaurant Sunday night for a no-holds- barred bash.
If you do happen to go to Buona Notte, be sure you get in the right lineup. It’s surrounded by three popular bars – Business next door, Di Salvio just up the street, the Blue Dog nearby – and the restaurant Shed across the street, all of which qualifies that block below Prince Arthur St. as one of the busiest in town.
The restaurant is the antithesis of everything I look for in an Italian place. It’s huge and planning to become even larger, and it looks like a warehouse: brown, sponge-painted walls, orange concrete floor, tiny, white-napped tables in mess-hall rows, so close that your neighbor’s elbow is never more than a nudge away, and an exhausting noise level.
And yet we had a great time.
The regular menu is not overly large, nor expensive (all items are well under $10) but everything sounds so good and/or interesting that making a choice is excruciating.
Focaccia with caprino and pancetta, or thin-crust pizza with tuna, capers, olives, tomatoes and garlic? A risotto with wild mushrooms, or carpaccio with goat cheese and herbs? Black linguine with peppery tomato sauce or rigatoni with creamy walnut sauce?
The black linguine, by the way, is one of the best-sellers; about $5,000 worth is dispensed every week. Colored with squid ink, it looks very dramatic but I’ve never found it to be more desirable than white. Our dilemmas were solved pretty quickly when the items on the small table d’hote posted on a chalkboard were pointed out and described.
One of the five main dishes offered was chicken with three peppers ($16) and another the chef’s plate for $26. Both prices included an entree. One of us chose the aranchini, the other a fantasy salad. While waiting, we munched on an order of the delicious focaccia ($4.95), hot pizza-like bread topped with sharp caprino cheese and pancetta (Italian bacon).
The aranchini is a Sicilian specialty made by one of the partner’s mothers, Filomena Leone, and makes for a very filling entree. It is the same idea as the classic suppli al telephono, only shaped in a large, orange-sized ball.
A good risotto is mixed with boccancini (fresh cheese), minced green peas, mozzarella and minced veal, rolled into a ball, breaded and floured, deep-fried briefly to crisp it, then finished in the oven. It was served with a tomato sauce and a cream sauce and was quite delicious.
The salad was a generous mix of small-leaf arugula, Boston lettuce, red endives and provolone cheese with a light, good vinaigrette.
The chicken with three peppers was a real winner, the well-pounded chicken breast marinated overnight with lemon, balsamic vinegar and wine, then pan-fried with olive oil and black, green and red peppercorns, to which demi-glace is added for the sauce.
A colorful medley of grilled red and green peppers, zucchini, carrots, yellow squash and green onions made for a very pretty, as well as tasty, plate.
It is the chef’s custom to personally deliver “his” plate whenever it is ordered, which is how I came to be spotted. It didn’t make much difference, since the plates were already served, but the already satisfactory service perked up quite noticeably thereafter.
The plate was huge but still a bit overpriced, I thought. It contained a small, thin, perfectly grilled sirloin steak topped with shards of goat cheese that hadn’t been melted and were a little rubbery; a small helping of good tortellini al pesto that could have been better with more basil; a large medallion of pasta stuffed with ricotta and spinach under a rose sauce with brandy, and the same grilled vegetables as above.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a small risotto arrived “just to taste” and just taste was about all we could do at this point. It was heavenly. Creamy but firm rice with pistachios, saffron, goat cheese, sun-dried tomatoes and cepe mushrooms. It made us want to start all over again.
Desserts also arrived without being specifically ordered, samplings of a superb cheesecake made with ricotta, mascarpone and cream, a great tiramisu, and a dollop of chocolate tagliatelle.
The latter was ordinary noodles well sauced with a combination of chocolate, mascarpone, cream, cocoa, cinnamon, strawberries and pistachios. Novel, and interesting, but I still prefer my pasta with savory sauces. Desserts cost between $4 and $4.50.
Coffee ($1.50) was good, as was the bottle of Collavini Merlot, ’90, we chose from the very limited wine list ($28.50).
