Civetta

It’s the classic New York story: country sweetheart moves to the big city, and though elements of her remain the same, she gets savvier, hungrier, and a little less innocent (cue “Moon River”). So it is with Civetta, the Soho offshoot of adored Nantucket restaurant Sfoglia. In its downtown New York incarnation, there’s the same farmhouse aesthetic upstairs, but downstairs lurks a sexy red velvet lounge with tables set for bottle service. Bottle service?! It’s the equivalent of Lupa expanding to LA and installing a swimming pool bar and white shag rug.

We waited until after the Nantucket summer season was over to visit Sfoglia’s New York sibling, hoping that husband-and-wife owners Ron Suhanosky and Colleen Marnell-Suhanosky would be firmly at the helm by then. When it’s good, Civetta’s food lives up to Sfoglia’s precedent. But when it misses the mark, you wonder how such an error could have gotten through, since the original Sfoglia was known for tight quality control, from ingredients to finished product.

An insalata mista ($8) hit the table dressed almost entirely in vinegar – we couldn’t even eat it. This was the sort of mistake that could easily have been prevented had someone in the kitchen tasted the dressing before serving it.

Octopus salad with chickpeas and black olives had a citrusy, anchovy-tinged flavor thick with olives, but the massive amount of chickpeas thoroughly overwhelmed the delicate, thinly shaved fresh octopus. The final product didn’t match the $12 price point.

Meatballs got an interesting twist, made here with lamb and goat cheese. These juicy braised polpettine ($12) in a saffron sauce struck just the right balance between meat and cheese and are a safe bet for the antipasti course.

I wish we could have tried every pasta dish on the menu, because the gnocchi with fondutta and roasted mushrooms ($20) looked excellent, as did the risotto made with red wine ($20). As it was, Civetta’s rigatoni alla Bolognese ($22) exceeded expectations, with an authentic northern Italian preparation made mostly with cream, herbs and ground pork, and without the tomatoes that creep into hodgepodge Italian food.

Chicken al mattone ($26) is basically Italian for “chicken under a brick,” and Civetta’s was just as good as Sfoglia’s preparation. With its beautiful herbal, lemony flavor and crispy skin, this roast chicken is comfort food worth coming back for.

Less successful was the bread pudding for dessert: Though the pudding itself was nicely crafted and artfully topped with a candied orange rind garnish, the inside was still cold, presumably because it had just come out of the fridge and wasn’t thoroughly heated through, another indication of carelessness.

D. quickly deduced that civetta means owl, owing to all the owl paraphernalia lying around. We didn’t agree with reviews that found the interior design bland; it seems silly to expect a restaurant to wait around for a 19th-century brownstone floor-through to open up before expanding downtown. More worrisome was the downstairs lounge, pictured above, which that night held a smattering of leggy Frederic Fekkai blondes. Are the owners of Sfoglia going for the serious cash downstairs, and if so, at what expense to their homegrown image? Like Doc of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, we don’t really want to think about what our country sweetheart is doing to make money in the big city.

Civetta
98 Kenmare Street, between Cleveland Place and Mulberry Street
New York, NY
212-274-9898
Civetta website