So when, precisely, did osteria and trattoria replace brasserie as the catchword for casually chic, Continental-style dining in this city? For argument’s sake, let’s date the first stirrings of the trend back to Mario Batali’s great faux-Roman osteria Lupa, which opened in the Village more than a decade ago. Since then, studiously chic, nouveau-rustico Italian establishments have been popping up around town like mushrooms. These restaurants tend to have snappy names (Crispo, Morini, Maialino). Many occupy cramped, neighborly spaces with fake rafters on the ceilings and have dining counters designed largely for the consumption of Italian wines. The menus are filled with crudo appetizers and carefully curated salumi boards (frequently featuring that great Batali favorite, lardo). The pastas are earthy and handmade, and the ragùs are often freighted with faithfully authentic peasant delicacies like coxcombs, stewed tripe, and cured pork jowls.
You will find many of the totems of the nouveau-rustico movement on display at Spasso, which opened early this year, on the corner of Hudson and Perry Streets in the West Village. There’s the bouncy, Bastianich-style name (“amusement” in Italian), and the slightly awkward storefront space, which in this case has been fitted with not one but two cramped dining counters. There are the carefully chosen, modestly priced Italian wines (just 120 bottles of them) in the cellar and the de rigueur selections of house-cured salumi (coppa with roasted peppers, lardo with rosemary) and crudo (amberjack with sea urchin). Spasso’s chef and partner, Craig Wallen, has studied under many of the high priests of the rustico movement (with Michael White at Convivio, and at Lupa itself), and his designer pastas are “hand-rolled,” according to the restaurant’s website, and dressed with properly earthy ingredients like chopped pork shoulder and braised duck leg.
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