It’s not like I hadn’t seen all the red circles on Resy’s calendar telling me there were no reservations at Ci Siamo every time I checked, and I checked often. But when I finally showed up to eat in the restaurant’s hangar-style dining room, I was surprised to see how many other people were there too.
Omicron had begun chopping through town—my guests and I nervously swapped test results for several days before and after a meal. New Yorkers would squat again and stay close to home. To most people, that seems to preclude an expedition to a windy plaza west of the Moynihan Train Hall.
But I had forgotten one of the key words of the restaurant business: if Danny Meyer builds it, they come.
Whether they will continue to come is another question, one that depends not only on the progress of the pandemic, but also on Ci Siamo’s ability to trigger long-lasting commitment after its novelty wears off. Mr. Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group once seemed to have that on a formula. But it closed one of its restaurants, North End Grill, in 2018. Another, Manhattan, has still not emerged from the Covid-induced closure; the most recent Instagram post, looking for chefs, servers, and other new hires to prepare for reopening, is over a year old.
The two restaurants had something in common besides ownership: neither of them completely escaped suspicion that they existed primarily to take advantage of a sweet real estate deal. They were like those political candidates whose campaigns sink because they never manage to explain why they are in the running.
Such vagueness does not affect Ci Siamo. It’s also a child of real estate, one of the many eateries that, like breadcrumbs to ducks, are scattered around the Manhattan West complex that Brookfield Properties built above the train tracks on their way to New Jersey. But Ci Siamo’s goals are clear and the rewards are clear. It’s the best and most confident restaurant we’ve had from Mr. Mayer have received.
Ci Siamo has been around since October and is all Italian, from the name you see on the door (“Ci siamo?”, that’s how waiters in Italy ask if you’re ready to order) to the dessert you almost certainly want have just before you leave. The executive chef, Hillary Sterling, has a lively, inviting style that made her latest restaurant, Vic’s, on Great Jones Street, stand out from the deadlock of downtown pizza, pasta and burrata restaurants.
At Ci Siamo, she’s expanded her menu and stepped up her cooking skills with a new tool: an open, wood-burning fireplace that seems wide enough to roast a medium-sized lion. The smoke from the open fire and the range of heat, from warm to scorching, will change the way you experience Mrs Sterling’s cooking. At Vic’s you saw a lot of people flying from plate to plate, like honey bees. They really dig themselves in at Ci Siamo.
The skin of a whole trout, brown over the flames, crackled between my teeth like a flake of seaweed; wilted mustard greens sweetened with pine nuts and golden raisins spilled from the belly. There was nothing left of the fish when I was done with it, except the tail and part of the head, minus the cheeks.
A big fisted swordfish got a gentler treatment from the hearth if not from me. Under a version of the Sicilian lemon and herb sauce salmoriglio, cleverly enhanced with chopped artichoke hearts, the fish was creamy and juicy, its gently pungent smokiness the only evidence of the fire.
Before heading out on her own, Mrs. Sterling was fortunate enough to cook for Bobby Flay and Missy Robbins, and the judgment of knowing what to take from them. She has Mr. Flay’s ability to enlighten every taste bud at once; the mussels, lobster, scallops, and swordfish in her seafood salad get salt and bitterness from the brine from Castelvetrano olives, acid from fresh lemon, heat from whole Calabrian chiles, and a lost shake from Aleppo pepper.
She doesn’t turn up the volume as high as he does, but even in relatively low-key amounts, her enthusiasm for spices in multiple dimensions gives her Italian food a distinctly American crackle. Shell beans of various colors, sizes and flavours, braised with lots of sage and rosemary, are punctuated by oil-salted black olives. I could turn it into a meal on a chilly, austere evening.
Her time with Mrs. Robbins is rewarded with Ci Siamo’s pastas, which are smooth, expert and homemade. I’m not as fond of the topini – flying saucers filled with wet mashed potatoes – as my servers seemed to be, but the stracci is probably the best rabbit pasta I’ve ever encountered, and the tomato sauce with tagliatelle made me dizzy, not just because there were heaps of butter are folded into the tomatoes, but also because the butter is made from the milk of water buffalo.
Desserts are in the hands of Claudia Fleming. That’s a sentence I’ve wanted to write for a long time. When Ms. Fleming last worked at a restaurant in New York City, “Friends” was still running on NBC. This was at Gramercy Tavern, where she showed that minimalistic accuracy in pies, cakes and biscuits can lead to maximum enjoyment.
Now that she oversees the pastry kitchens for the entire Union Square group, including Ci Siamo, it’s clear her aesthetic is ideal for borderline-sweet Italian desserts. Her dense chocolate budino is buried under an airy, slightly bitter espresso zabaglione studded with dark chocolate shingles. A long, sharp wedge of torta contains a lemon custard just tart enough to welcome the sweet relief of the soft, toasted meringue. And there are candied bomboloni shaped like daisies, with six petals that you can pull apart and dip in warm chocolate sauce spiked with amaro in a magically correct proportion.
Over the past two years, many New Yorkers have come to a new appreciation for the quiet neighborhood restaurants, the moms we sometimes take for granted. Places like Ci Siamo play a different role in our lives. I don’t have to eat food cooked in a fire pit the size of a lion, but if I get the occasional chance to find out what a chef like Mrs Sterling can do with it, I’ll take it.
And sometimes I wanted to hide under the table when I saw Danny Meyer’s young, high-spirited servers coming straight at me as ambassadors of a nation of chipmunks, but there’s something wonderful about the presence of mind and professionalism on display at Ci Siamo – wonderful and, given the beleaguered state of the restaurant business, hopeful. I left the restaurant and thought: it’s possible.
