1123 Broadway

                                                                                  212-547-8750

     By John Mariani
 

                  There’s no doubt that a wood-fired oven can impart delectable nuances to certain foods. By the same token, some cooks overdue the amount of smoke for some meats and fish that robs them of their essential flavors. Fortunately, no such error is committed at Lupetto, which means “little wolf,” a new Italian restaurant located in NoMad.
                  The food mimics that of the rustic hearth cooking in Italy, although Lupetto’s ovens are far more refined and modulated. Restaurateur Mark Barak and chef-partner Michael Berardino add a lightly smoked luster to everything from pizzas to meats and fish from an open kitchen while keeping the classics squarely on the menu.
                  The 175-seat space (with a downstairs room called Sotto with 40 seats) is dominated by a long bar and center divider, with a good deal of polished wood, by Parts and Labor Design. There are tables up front and a dining room to the rear that could use more light to make the menu easier to read and do justice to the colors of the food.
             What the room does not need is the bombast of thudding bass and bashing drums—whatever music it is you won’t be able to identify—which is the polar opposite of what a rustic trattoria anywhere in Italy would have, which is no music at all. Oddly enough, about 9:30, when Lupetto started to empty out, they played some old Italian pop music, which was fun to hear as we finished our wine.
         It’s not easy choosing among so many tempting starts, but I would most recommend the tender, very flavorful arancini rice balls with tomato, saffron and smoked mozzarella ($18), and that fiery oven adds a real tasty char to the octopus with pepper relish ($22). We had to test out the Neapolitan-style pizza ($24) with fior di latte mozzarella, and it was a good one; a tad thin but sizeable enough to share.
         As ever in Italian restaurants, pastas will stand out and Lupetto’s are simple with tremendous flavor. You don’t see spaghetti aglio e olio ($23) outside of Old School Italian-American trattorias, but Lupetto’s is outstanding (right), the pasta perfect, the amount of garlic and good olive just right and with an added tang of what I assume was lemon. Every bit as wonderful was a dish of fat bucatini all’amatriciana  ($27) with sweet tomato and guanciale, onions and a hit of chile pepper (left).
        The guitar-string cut called chitarra takes on an unusual sauce of Meyer lemon and sweet Bronte pistachio ($26); even more unusual was the crespelle (crêpe) stuffed with porcini mushrooms and caramelized onions layered with white bolognese béchamel sauce (28), one of my favorite pastas thus far this year.
                  There’s a special place on the menu for oven-roasted meats, including an exceptional thick, juicy, perfectly cooked pork porterhouse porchetta, spiced and seasoned with great authority ($44), which I hope becomes Berardino’s signature dish. He does well by a (very expensive) 16-ounce ribeye for one ($72) or two ($165) from cattle that are grass fed, as in Italy, but without the richness of USDA Prime. The ribeye for one handily serves two people, so the one for two would be enough for four.
                  Orata is a fine alternative to the ubiquitous branzino, and Lupetto’s wood-fire gives it a subtle flavor and keeps in the juices.
                  The same degree of simple goodness is evident in desserts ($14) like the ricotta cheesecake, with pistachios for crunch and meringue for fun; chocolate cake with a lush mascarpone mousse and espresso glaze; and chocolate panna cottta with candied hazelnuts.
                  There is obviously no end to the number of good Italian trattorias that New York can absorb, and usually when I’m asked for recommendations, the request is overwhelmingly for Italian food. And in this section of Manhattan, with a lot to choose among, Lupetto would certainly leap to mind to recommend. Now, if only they’d turn down that noise!

Open nightly for dinner.

        Katie was feeling frustrated. “So you did not pursue the incident?”
         “I did, Katie, I did. But to make a long story short, whomever I spoke to basically shrugged and said if I saw no actual sexual act going on, there was nothing really to report and that—and here’s what repulsed me—that it would be very embarrassing for Ryan and especially for the child to go further with an investigation.  They said that even if something horrible had occurred, Miguel’s parents would never agree to have him testify and be exposed to ridicule by everyone, especially his schoolmates.
         “They did nothing at all?”
        “One of my superiors said he’d have a talk with Ryan.”
         “Did he?”
         “I have no way of knowing.  All I know is that Ryan went on with his teaching and coaching tennis and that Miguel stayed in school but was assigned to another teacher for what had been Ryan’s courses. Miguel did drop out of tennis.”
         Katie was sinking into deep sadness, as much for her friend Joseph as for the children, and the only thing that kept her from breaking into tears was her rage over priests getting away with such predatory behavior.
         “So, Joey, you left because you felt incapable of doing anything after that?”
         Joseph rubbed the back of his neck and said, “I might well have stayed in, tried to mount an offense, go outside the community, but I needed evidence. And when I started to look for it, comparing the number of students—good students—who mysteriously dropped out of school with their parents’ approval with rates at other schools in the city and elsewhere, I began to see a pattern so widespread that it was making me sick and driving me away from my faith in God. I was getting no direction from my prayers, no help from my colleagues, and, eventually, I was told I was to have an audience with the bishop of the diocese.”
         Katie’s eyebrows rose a bit in the hope that better news was coming.
         “So, I went to see the bishop, who’d been in that position for thirty years by then, and I was hoping he would be receptive to my research, such as it was, and that perhaps he would help launch an investigation and get to the bottom of things.”
         “And?”
         Joseph described how he’d been picked up by a lay assistant to the bishop, whose name was Juan de Castro, and driven into the capital to his residence attached to the city’s 16th century Metropolitan Cathedral and Parish of Saint Vitalis and of the Guardian Angels. Vitalis was the patron saint of prostitutes. The night before, Joseph had looked up the biography of St. Vitalis to find he was a martyr of Milan, who had sacrificed his life by being tortured on the rack then buried alive. Joseph was feeling nothing like a martyr, at least not yet.
         The church was done in the typical Spanish colonial style of the period, and much of it was destroyed in the war by Allied bombing.  But within its catacombs lay the silent remains of the priests and bishops who had served the church in their lifetime.
         Joseph was ushered into a large plain office, decorated sparsely with a crucifix, a painting of the Virgin Mary, an oak desk and upholstered chairs. Bishop de Castro, now in his late seventies, rose to meet the young Jesuit, saying, in perfect English, “Ah, Joseph, thank you so much for coming.  I’ve heard so many good things about you.  All good, as a matter of fact.”
         Joseph returned the greeting with a smile and sat down, waiting to be spoken to. The old bishop put on his glasses and glanced down at a file on his desk.
         “So, my son, I understand you have been doing some extracurricular study of some kind on the drop-out rates within our diocese? That sounds interesting.”
         Joseph was dumbfounded that the bishop would know anything about his priests’ activities beyond the walls of the school and had to assume that word had gotten back to the bishop from the various sources Joseph had contacted during his investigation.
         “Have you found out anything of use to us to know?” asked De Castro, taking off his glasses and staring intently at his young priest.
         Joseph had a sudden feeling of having been betrayed and felt he had to be very careful, as if he were being probed by the authorities. He said nothing at first, then spoke: “Your Holiness, the object of my research has been into how many students have left our schools for no attributed reasons. There were good students, poor students, some whose family moved away, but otherwise there were so many who left without cause.”
         “When you say ‘many,’ what kind of numbers are you speaking of?” asked De Castro.
         “I have only really looked back over the past ten years,” said Joseph, “but from my very, very incomplete records, I have found scores of such cases, perhaps even a hundred.”
         De Castro picked up a pen and began writing. “That many. Well, then, what have you found to be the causes of these mysterious students dropping out?”
         Father Joseph Evangelisti leaned forward and said, “I cannot prove any of this, Your Holiness, and certainly not in all cases, but in a significant number of them I fear that it may have been the result of. . . improper sexual behavior on the part of their teachers.” He hesitated to say priests.

"The Martyrdom of St. Vitalis" by Federico Barocci  (I553).

         “You mean you think these students were sexually molested and sent away because they became pregnant?”
        “Some, but certainly not all. Many, perhaps most, were young boys.”
         De Castro kept writing, without looking up. “Of what age?”
         “I would say the average age was fifteen to seventeen, some younger.”
         “And do you believe some of these cases involved improper behavior by priests?”
         Joseph nodded. “I’m afraid so,” but stopped short of saying it appeared most of the cases involved priests, brothers, even nuns.
         “And you have turned up strong evidence to that effect?”
         “No, Your Holiness, I have not, and that is why I have come to you to ask your help in finding out the truth.”   

Chef Luca Grammatico serves dogs at his restaurant called Fiuto in Rome with dishes of chicken nuggets, zucchini and mashed potatoes blended and formed into a dog bone shape.“Presentation is very important,” he said.