During the course of his industrious career, the frenetic West Village restaurateur Gabriel Stulman has mastered almost every casual dining trend in this fickle, fashionably casual restaurant era. He helped pioneer the upscale New American neighborhood-bistro craze (not to mention the upscale-burger craze and upscale-meatball-slider craze) with Joey Campanaro at the Little Owl, and then again at his own popular, tiny West Village restaurant, Joseph Leonard. He’s opened a counter-style restaurant devoted to stylishly casual food (Jeffrey’s Grocery) and a raffish neo-speakeasy joint (Fedora) featuring the nose-to-tail cooking of a young chef from the offal capital of North America, Montreal. You can enjoy very good nouveau-southern cooking in Stulman’s mini dining empire (the crispy ham-hock sandwich at Joseph Leonard) and an endless variety of trendy retro cocktails, many of which are poured by whiskery barkeeps wearing lumberjack shirts.
So it was only a matter of time before Stulman got around to tackling the most durable of all casual New York dining trends: rustic Italian food. His new restaurant is called Perla, and like his other establishments, it occupies a snug little space within walking distance of Sheridan Square. The bar serves drinks with catchy names like Tombstone Sunday Nights and Meet Me in Laredo. The clubby, beamy room is decorated with tastefully curated retro tchotchkes (faded black-and-white photos, framed antique menus) and lined with banquettes covered in shiny crimson leather. Party girls graze at the bar on esoteric varieties of handmade pasta. Obscure peasant delicacies like roasted lamb’s head are served as occasional specials. And the late-night bar menu includes boutique mushroom pizzas fired in that great totem of the Italian nouveau-rustico movement, the wood-burning oven.
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