Dining & Wine

Dining & Wine

GASTRONOMIA CULINARIA

A Modest Reminder of Rome

Hungry City: Gastronomia Culinaria on the Upper West Side

The bread lay on a notched wooden board, anchored by a saucer of something creamy and wildly green that evoked pesto but tasted like ocean floor. When asked about the ingredients, the waiter looked startled. “I do not know the name for this in English,” he said. “Rucola? Also a small fish.” Arugula and anchovy, a woman at my table suggested. He smiled, shrugged and vanished.

We took his benign indifference to our language (along with the uncompromising brininess in that saucer) as a good sign. Gastronomia Culinaria, which opened last December on the northern end of the Upper West Side, feels true to a certain type of small Roman trattoria, where the food is plain-spoken and the pricing temperate.

The chef and owner, Vincenzo Pezzilli, is a native of Rome who said his first attempt at cooking, at age 5, ended with the arrival of the fire department. (The dish was penne all’arrabbiata; he burned the garlic.) In 1997, at 27, he came to New York and began working his way through the city’s classical Italian restaurants, including the original Coco Pazzo and, more recently,Paola’s on the Upper East Side. A decade ago, he briefly ran his own restaurant, Culinaria, in Times Square.

His new venture is more modest in ambition. There is no sign outside, in part because when the restaurant first opened, Mr. Pezzilli had not yet settled on a name. (In Italian, culinaria means the art of cooking; the gastronomia part of the enterprise in still in the works, with plans for baked goods to be sold by day at a counter equipped with a vintage espresso machine.)

Lavender and juniper plants line the sidewalk, beside a bench built with planks from the wooden box that once encased the kitchen’s 1,400-pound baker’s oven. The wreath of vines on the weathered, oversize door was made by Mr. Pezzilli’s wife, Dianne. Inside the narrow dining room is a mix of rustic and urbane, with dish towels for napkins, brick walls hung with abstract pain

...