A Map of Your Taste Buds Shaped Like Italy
By PETE WELLS
IS it crazy to fall for a restaurant because of a handful of chickpeas? Tumbling around with pickled currants under crunchy stalks of grilled octopus leg, these chickpeas were smaller and sweeter than usual, less starchy and grainy. Tasting one was like encountering a goldfinch if the only birds you’d ever seen were pigeons.

Still, they were just chickpeas. Is it more logical to fall for a restaurant because of sliced bread in a basket? It was remarkable stuff, with the gradually unfolding nuances of taste that are achieved only through a slow and patient fermentation of dough with wild yeast.

But other restaurants serve great bread. So let’s blame it on the salumi board, with satiny pink and white folds of lonza and capocollo and lardo that melt on the tongue into a lasting impression of salt, pig fat and time. The meats, cured and aged in the basement of Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria, are among the finest salumi in the country.

In truth, there were a dozen little tastes that made me fall for this restaurant, which opened on Great Jones Street four months ago and has become New York’s most complete realization so far of a powerful myth: the simple and convivial spot that tastes just like Italy.

That myth is an old one. You go to a small town in Umbria and find your way to some modest trattoria, or maybe a market with a few tables. Then lunch arrives, and the top of your head comes off. Meanwhile everybody around you has their elbows on the table and is acting like food this good is no big thing. And you say, why not? Why couldn’t we have a place just like this back home?....
Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria
53 Great Jones Street (Bowery); (212) 837-2622; ilbucovineria.com.