Bocca

So this Bocca is not the generic midtown lunch place that served pizza, panini’s, sushi, & udon soup. This Bocca is on 19th street just north of Union Square and has a Rome inspired menu of Italian food (and thankfully no sushi). It was well over a month ago now that I went here so I will try to piece together whatever I can from my rather fuzzy memory.

I walked in here for a Restaurant Week dinner one night with a few friends after a movie and was pleasantly surprised for a random weeknight dinner. It started off pretty well because the waitress was quite friendly and the sommelier was helpful in providing some good wine suggestions. They gave us a couple different samples of wine and we ended up getting a quartino of the a Sicilian grape variety called Frappato that I had never heard of before (more on that later).

For appetizers we started with the following :
- Rucula: Arugula salad with gorgonzola and roasted red & golden beets
- Polipo: Grilled wild octopus with a warm cannellini bean salad
- Finocchi: Fennel salad with oranges and black olives

Both salads were good, but not fantastic. The real standout here was the octopus salad. Very tender with tons of flavor. The beans were a nice textural contrast to the tender octopus and complimented it quite well.

For entrees we had :
- Tonnarelli Cacio e Pepe: Handmade pasta prepared table side with pecorino romano and black pepper
- Coda: Braised oxtail with smoked mozzarella polenta and fried celery
- Trota: Oven roasted fillet of trout with sliced roasted potatoes and a roasted bell pepper salad

I was debating between their other pasta dish and I am quite glad I decided on the tonnarelli. They bring out a giant wheel of pecorino romano and they begin to prepare your “sauce” for the pasta. They start by scraping up some cheese and mixing it with a healthy dose of coarsely grated black pepper. Next, they add the hot pasta (which is like thick spaghetti) to the “bowl” formed by digging out the cheese from dishes prior which melts the cheese they just scraped up for my dish. Then they mix the two together for a bit before plating and handing it to you. The result is fantastic. Definitely rich since the sauce is mostly cheese. Definitely a bit strong on the pepper which could be too much for some people. I would actually fall into that category and wish it had been a bit lighter on the pepper, but still a great dish.

The other entree that I liked was the braised oxtail with fried celery. I almost ordered that instead of the pasta, but I just had braised short ribs two days earlier at August in the West Village and did not want to have another fatty red meat dish as amazing as they are. Very tasty stuff though and the celery was a nice compliment to it. The smoked mozzarella polenta was very lackluster though. The mozzarella was melted on top of the polenta and gave it a greasy taste.

The last entree, the trout, was disappointing to me. It was pretty unmemorable and I would not order it. The potatoes were pretty flavorless and did not seem like a good compliment to the fish in the way it was prepared. I am also not a huge fan of trout to begin with. Anyhow, I noticed later is that it was the only one of the Restaurant Week entrees that was not on the regular menu. That leads me to believe that they just picked a fish dish that was cheap enough to prepare that would fall into their budget for Restaurant Week. I just checked the current extended Restaurant Week menu and saw that they had taken this off the menu and replaced it with a salmon dish.

For desserts we each got one of the three options they had and shared them. I remember them being pretty good, but none of them stand out in my memory right now (it has been over six weeks now).

My friend Rachel did a much more thorough and entertaining review on yelp that is probably worth a read if you are interested in going to this restaurant.

Bocca Restaurant & Bar
39 E 19th St
New York, NY 10003
(212) 387-1200