164 West 75th Street
212-787-6300

I struggle to come up with an excuse for waiting this long to try 'Cesca, Tom Valenti's celebrated new entry just two blocks from my apartment. I don't dine out much unless Lisa's around, and she's only around on weekends when 'Cesca is generally pretty solidly booked, so I never really bothered to try to get a table. But on Friday Lisa came into town late, and I called to see if I could get an 11:00 p.m. table. I could, and did, and so prepared myself to confront Valenti's much-admired homestyle Italian fare.

The layout of 'Cesca is similar to that at Valenti's highly successful Ouest: an open kitchen bordered by a wraparound bar; three-quarter circle banquettes interlaced with smaller deuces and four-tops; a large separate bar area. The main difference is the color scheme: gone are the brash reds and blacks of Valenti's modern bistro. The decor at 'Cesca is a distillation of Upper West Side bourgeois chic: Dark walnut, soft-lit plaster, natural linen, faux-wrought-iron. Very Pottery Barn. Valenti wants you to feel like you're a guest in a pre-war West 70s co-op; you and about 60 other people.

The food at 'Cesca is fairly good, but frankly, not worth all the hype it's been getting. Lisa's beef carpaccio, flecked with chips of dried bresaola and studded with croutons, was pleasant but not memorable. My roasted oysters with tomato zabayon, which kept up the dried-dried-meats motif with flecks of crunchy prosciutto for garnish, provided a warm, creamy squirt of tomato flavor but not much else. Any trace of the oyster's flavor was irretrievably lost to the onslaught of eggs and tomatoes, and all that remained was the serving-dish of a shell and a squishy little nugget of anonymous sea-flesh.

My main dish was my favorite of the night: an expertly braised pork shank, sitting in a bowl full of pastina floating in a delicately sweet broth, topped with perfectly roasted carrots, celery, onions and garlic. Lisa fared not quite as well: her bucatini all'amatriciana was too clever by half. Valenti, straying from his cucina di mama formula, has deconstructed the classic amatriciana sauce, tossing his snakelike pasta in fresh tomatoes, pancetta crispies, pepperoncino flakes and chopped-up hard-boiled egg. I prefer an amatriciana that allows all the components of the sauce to come together smoothly. If I add egg at all, it's off the flame, raw, similar to a carbonara preparation, allowing the heat of the just-cooked pasta to gently coalesce the egg around the noodles and thicken the tomato sauce. It's better than cheese, better than cream, and a hell of a lot better than Valenti's bucatini. Consider the chunky confusion of 'Cesca's pasta bowl against the balanced smoothness of this amatriciana dish, from San Teodoro in Rome (just a stone's throw from the Roman Forum):

I ask you, gentle reader, which would you rather eat?

Dinner ended well though. The most endearing element of the 'Cesca experience is its amari tasting - a trendy gimmick that Batali et al. have also been trying to popularize. 'Cesca has a wide selection, and offers tastings of three for around the price of a good glass of port. Not for the uninitiated, amaro is a potent digestif -- literally, it means "bitter". But after a rich, full meal, I find that the potent aromatics of herbs and bitter fruit essences enliven the palate and revive the body -- like smelling salts after a blow to the head. This being a rarity in the still-underperforming restaurant scene of the West 70s, I might be inclined in the future to stop by 'Cesca after dining elsewhere, just to sidle up to a sleek walnut table with a glass of rosy spirits.

So what do I think of 'Cesca? Contrary to the hype, Valenti isn't turning the Upper West Side around singlehandedly. That's not really a fault; I don't think any one chef could do so. And though I find some of this chef's efforts to be confusing or simply off the mark, I have to give him full credit for trying. But 'Cesca is not the second coming, and it doesn't make my neighborhood any more of a dining destination. It's a decent neighborhood trattoria, slightly upscale, with some winners and some duds. When the hype dies down, I think it will be a perfectly pleasant place to dine, but in the meantime you won't be finding my name on the wait list.