THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021 11
PHOTOGRAPH BY MYESHA EVON GARDNER FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
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TABLESFORTWO
Barbuto
113 Horatio St.
With the original Barbuto, Jonathan
Waxman nailed the formula for a great
neighborhood restaurant: cool location,
lack of pretension, seasonal pastas, killer
chicken. It opened in 2004, pre-meat-
packing-district mania, on a quiet West
Village corner below the photographer
Fabrizio Ferri’s Industria studio—it
didn’t hurt that models and celebrities
might drop in after sessions—with
garage doors that rolled up in clement
weather and a chef ’s table in the tiny
kitchen, open for all to see. What they
saw was calm, genial Waxman himself,
doing his thing at a double-decker oven
created by the master oven-builder Nob-
ile Attie, making the traditional cuisine
of the Italian Riviera feel fresh.
When Barbuto was forced to close, in
May, 2019, after the building was sold, a
collective cry went up from neighbor-
hood fixtures and restaurant lovers alike.
Waxman, ever assuring, found a new
spot a couple of blocks away. He told
me recently, “To be truthful, after sixteen
years of doing business in that space ...
The building was falling apart, so to go
into a new space—well, it’s an old space,
but it’s a new infrastructure—was really
advantageous for us. The only bad thing
was we opened in February of last year,
COVID happened, and we were only open
for three weeks. What’re ya gonna do?”
After the shutdown, Waxman quickly
decided that takeout wouldn’t work, and
so he waited until it was safe to reopen.
“Vaccines were a game changer,” Waxman
said. “The mandates by the city—in terms
of, We don’t have to be the bad cop—that
really helped my industry.”
What’s new at the new Barbuto? Be-
sides the gargantuan room, lined with
arched, brick-framed windows, not
much. Barbuto means “bearded,” and the
restaurant’s shaggy-dog logo, a likeness
of Ferri’s (similarly well-bearded) Irish
wolfhound, remains. Waxman has been
cooking in élite circles since the seventies,
when he worked at Alice Waters’s Chez
Panisse, and there are roots to his past ev-
erywhere you look. Attie created an even
bigger oven than the first one—a must
for all the chickens Waxman serves. “I’ll
have a dead chicken head on my grave,
I’m sure,” he cracked. The dish evolved
from a chicken frites that he cooked in
1979, at Michael’s in Santa Monica;
then he did a grilled boned chicken at
his first New York restaurant, Jams, in
the eighties. Barbuto’s Pollo al Forno,
an homage to Judy Rodgers’s Zuni Café
roast chicken for two (he and Rodgers
worked together at Chez Panisse), is half
a bird, grilled and drizzled with a salsa
verde of anchovies, capers, garlic, olive
oil, parsley, and whatever other herbs
are around. “We don’t brine it,” Wax-
man said. “Just sea salt and fresh pep-
per, and we kind of baste it with its own
liquid as it cooks. And the big deal is
resting—for a minimum of half an hour.”
At brunch one cold afternoon, fluffy
focaccia, an ideally lemony and garlicky
bitter-lettuce salad with fried calamari,
and a creamy bucatini carbonara were
followed by a chewy-crusted smoked-
salmon pizza with avocado crème fraîche
and smoked trout roe. The pizza was de-
scribed by the waiter—whose manner was
so easygoing that it seemed as if he were
just stopping by to chat—as an homage to
“the chef ’s friend Wolfgang Puck.” Wax-
man said that when Puck opened Spago,
in 1982, “I walked in one day and Wolf-
gang goes, ‘I’m making this Jewish pizza,’
and I said, ‘What are you talking about?’
It was a pizza bianca with no cheese, just
a little bit of shallots and crème fraîche,
this homemade smoked salmon and caviar
on top. And I said, ‘You know what? This
is the greatest thing I’ve ever had.’ ” The
waiter also brought free champagne, be-
cause, he said, it was the right thing to do.
Signature items are indicated on the
menu with a JW insignia, but there’s no
need—almost all of the dishes have an
iconic air. It’s unusual for a Manhattan
restaurant to take up so much space,
and, in spite of the view of the West Side
Highway and the river beyond, it feels
like you could be pretty much anywhere.
But the Whitney is just a block away, and
Waxman’s crispy rosemary potatoes are
gold. (Dishes $5-$39.)
—Shauna Lyon
