Babbo

Babbo
110 Waverly Place
New York, NY 10011

Had dinner at Babbo with a small group of friends yesterday evening. The hype for this restaurant may have died down a bit, but making reservations certainly didn't seem to be the case. To get reservations, you have to call one month in advance to the day at exactly 10am. Call any later and the phone line will be busy and you will get stuck with a very early or late time slot.

We arrived at 5:45pm for our Sunday evening reservation and the place was already filling up quickly. Babbo is a fairly fancy restaurant and their dress code is smart dressy. For the ladies, nice jeans are ok. Definitely better to dress up than look and feel underdressed. For gentlemen, a jacket and tie are not required though it's not unusual. Coats can not be hung on the backs of chairs so coat check may sometimes be required. Lucky for me, I sat on a bench against the wall so I just sat with my coat tucked behind me.

My friends and I had great expectations for the food. After all this is Mario Batali's place.

We were given a free starter - chickpeas with olives on toasted bread.

Then we had the grilled octopus and appetizer size goose liver ravioli.

The grilled octopus was just ok. The goose liver ravioli was excellent and more than made up for the mediocre octo.

For our main course, we had the following:

Lobster spaghettini - one pound lobster does not mean one pound of lobster meat. The tomato sauce on the pasta was done perfectly! Though nothing spectacular either.

Duck - super dry! Don't recommend this dish.

Rabbit - this was an interesting dish, but nothing to write home about either.

Beef cheek ravioli - this was delicious! The pasta was very well made and filled with flavor. Highly recommend! This dish is popular for a reason.

We were too full for dessert and nothing really stood out on the menu. Luckily we didn't order dessert because we were served cookies. A bit of sugar was just perfect to end the meal.

Overall, it was a delicious meal but it still fell a bit short of my expectations from a top-chef owned restaurant. Service was excellent and staff was very courteous and professional. I still recommend coming to Babbo, but stick with the pasta and go elsewhere for dessert.