Napolese

We finally got around to trying this place this past Saturday, after a full day of activities and after I had spent the whole day with Jackson—which is not usually the best time to go somewhere and sit down for dinner, never mind a somewhat fancy place in a definitely-fancy part of town. Napolese, billed as “an artisanal pizzeria,” is brought to you by Martha Hoover, the local restauranteur responsible for the Patachou restaurants around town. She bills her eponymous Café Patachou as “a student union for adults.” And if you think this smacks of some good-old-fashioned Meridian-Kessler pretension, you’re absolutely right.

But the food is awfully damn good, even if it is too expensive relative to the portion size—though this is mostly to do with the fact that the menu is shot through with cage-free this and hand-made that, seasonal this and organic that. It also has a little bit to do with keeping the places looking like the current Pottery Barn catalogue. I suppose it’s a good business model for Ms. Hoover, given that she has placed most of her eateries in locations where the people who will be drawn to them are the kind of people who think it’s a good idea to keep up with Pottery Barn, the ones who read the The Help not because they want to read it, but because they heard it was an “important book.”

So yeah, after Brickworld on Saturday, we rolled up Illinois Street for awhile, until I got to 52nd Street and hadn’t found the place, and then remembered that it’s 49th and Pennsylvania, not 49th and Illinois. So I made a few right-hand turns and then managed to find a meter-less parking spot right on 49th Street. We were there about twenty minutes before their 5pm opening time, so we wandered around the neighborhood for a few minutes, stopping in at the Hubbard & Cravens across Pennsylvania Street so Amy could get some coffee. I saw a house for sale at 4822 North Washington Boulevard, and picked up the information sheet in the little box stuck in the front yard. The asking price is just a shade north of half a million dollars.

When we got back to Napolese, they were open for business, and we were able to be seated right away. Less than half an hour later, the small dining room would be full, and people would already be waiting for tables. We got the disappointed half-sneer from the server when we ordered nothing more interesting to drink than ice water, and a Sprite for Jackson. Other than that she was mostly friendly. She even apologized and gave a half-hearted explanation when the pizza Amy and I were going to split came out after the four pizzas that the party of six at the table next to us had ordered after we ordered ours.

For me, the most important part of the meal is the food—and as long as that part of the meal is excellent, I could give a frog’s fat ass about snooty service and pretentious décor. Fortunately, the food is what they do best at these Patachou joints. The house Caesar salad ($9) we ordered came out almost immediately, and was perfectly dressed. The little bits of shaved Parmesan (or perhaps Taleggio) sprinkled throughout exploded with flavor (and an unexpected but playful sweetness), and the romaine lettuce was cold and crisp, just as it should be. Jackson’s plain cheese Pizza Bambino ($8, “for those 8 and under please") came out only moments after the salad, and it looked remarkable. The cheese was perfectly melted in the middle, and the crust around the outer edge was puffed and airy, neither too thick, nor too thin, nor rolled according to some corporate instruction manual.

I’m not sure what the trick is that results in pizza crust that is crisp and crusty on the outside, but absolutely dreamy and soft and airy on the inside. Whatever that trick is, the folks making the pies (and you can sit at a little bar surrounding the open kitchen and watch them do this, if you like) at Napolese have nailed it. Jackson actually managed to eat the cheese parts of four of the six pieces of his pizza, but he rather unceremoniously chucked the crusts onto Amy’s plate, so we got a chance to become well-acquainted with the crust while we waited for our pizza to come out. It’s hard to describe just how perfect the crust was. It wasn’t really thick or thin—not the dense mess you get with chain places, and not the cardboard cracker that some mom-and-pops use to cut costs. I sort of hate to re-use their own snooty word, but the crust was something like a piece of artisanal bread—not quite a crusty French baguette, but something along those lines, something that had been prepared with care. The only negative thing about the crust was that it was salty.

Our Freestyle pizza (the Patachou version of build-your-own, starting with a $9 pie and adding ingredients that range from $2-$5) had caramelized leeks and goat cheese on it ($14), which Amy had picked out and which I was somewhat dubious about. I like goat cheese, but a little goes a really long way, and I wasn’t sure it was going to work on a pizza. The leeks sounded somewhat intriguing. As I mentioned, our pizza was an inordinately long time coming out, and it was lukewarm when it did. I’m not sure what definition of “caramelized” they were using, but that’s not how I would have described the leeks on that pizza. They were a shade of green that is easy to describe, but which doesn’t do much for the appetite. On the other hand, goat cheese on a pizza totally works—and on this pizza, especially, it helped to deflect attention away from the vegetables formerly known as leeks.

Despite all of those things that went wrong, though, I still thought the place rocked; and I’m actively looking forward to going back and trying something a little more interesting than goat cheese and leeks. That’s the thing about these Patachou places—they do so much so right, and so very well, that they can even manage to stumble a time or two during the meal, and still win you over. I sort of have to be in the mood for a Patachou place—willing to suffer the service and the prices—and then the food always makes me wonder why we don’t go there more often.

114 East 49th Street
925-0765
patachou.com