Restaurant review, So Hip It Hurts.

Tony May’s San Domenico restaurant, which closed last year after a long, respectable run on Central Park South, was a stately place designed to feed 150 or so clubby, well-heeled patrons at a sitting. But its radically modernized successor, SD26, which opened not long ago off Madison Square Park, has clearly been designed, somewhat self-consciously, with a younger, more fickle generation of eaters in mind. The waiters at the old joint wore white jackets with gold buttons. At SD26, they’re dressed in postmodernist outfits with Nehru collars. The old wine list was set between thick leather covers, in the traditional style. At SD26, it comes embedded, for the benefit of tech-savvy oenophiles, in a kind of handheld, PSP-like touchscreen device. The old room was decorated in lustrous tones of scarlet and gold. The new one has a darkened, disco-style wine-and-cocktail bar in the front, and what appear to be giant decorative balls of wool strung, more or less randomly, across the dining room ceiling and walls.

Mercifully, however, the chef running the large whitewashed kitchen at SD26 (the salumeria station alone is the size of a small bus) is Odette Fada, whose cooking won her a loyal following at the old San Domenico uptown. Which means once you’ve oriented yourself in the cavernous, bizarrely impersonal dining room and puzzled your way through the tortuous new menu (organized according to food products, like “Salumeria,” “Vegetables and Salads,” and “Meat, Poultry, and Game,” instead of the usual progression from appetizers to entrées), you’ll find some very good things to eat. I’m thinking of glistening ribbons of lardo served on wedges of fresh bread (from the excellent salumeria section), and a classic Sicilian caponata folded with pine nuts and segments of melting Japanese eggplant. Panzanella is a rough country dish, but in Fada’s hands it’s transformed into a kind of savory pastry, made with a round of finely mashed bread soaked in the juice of fresh tomatoes, with strips of silvery anchovies on top.

Read more at http://nymag.com/