Shea Gallante’s polished new Italian restaurant, Ciano, which has been doing a brisk business since it opened in November in the Flatiron district, feels at first like a very familiar kind of place. The taverna-style space on East 22nd Street (last occupied by the Tuscan restaurant Beppe) exudes the kind of well-worn, homey charm that’s made Italian food the default fine-dining choice of our comfort-obsessed era. The tables are covered in white linen, and the walls and banquettes are colored in hues of brick orange and brown. The wait staff wear gently rumpled jackets and ties, and several of them speak with accents that may or may not be from Milan or Rome. There are veal meatballs on the menu, and bowls of rustic-sounding Tuscan bean ragù. The bread is baked in-house and warmed in a roaring fireplace, and on winter evenings, the snug, toasty dining room fills with the pleasant aroma of wood smoke, as if on cue.
But Gallante, who made his reputation running kitchens for David Bouley and was the chef at the star-crossed but well-reviewed boom-era, wine-focused restaurant Cru, has his own highly particular vision of rustic-style, farm-to-table Italian cooking in mind. The meatballs are as big as plums and almost as soft, and they come to the table in a pool of smooth white polenta and dusted with shavings of Pecorino touched with truffles. The artichoke salad (with cherry tomatoes and bits of smoked ricotta) looks less like a country salad than a delicately arranged (and quite delicious) work of food art. The perfectly seared scallops in my antipasto were shipped in from Nantucket, and if you order the charcuterie board, you’ll find that the usual assortment of salumi and hams is enlivened with elegant little blocks of pâté made from chicken livers and calves’ tongues.
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