Otto

If you want to see why Mario Batali is famous but don't want to pony up the pesos for Babbo or Del Posto, I highly recommend Otto.  Batali's pizza/pasta restaurant is spitting distance from the arch in Washington Square and offers quality food at prices that draw NYU students right out of the park.

Amy and I decided to go splitskies on a pizza and pasta.  The first half of our combo was the pizza special with an egg, black truffle, and some sort of cured meat.  I love their super thin crust, perfect amount of cheese, and believe it or not an egg is the perfect topping for a pizza.  And don't forget that shaved truffle.  That topping made this pizza double the price of the others on the menu and it tasted great, though I'm not sure if it tasted doubly great.  We also ordered penne with a parsley, mint, and walnut pesto that got me nice and ready for spring.  The best part of the pasta was scooping up the leftover sauce with the bread...but isn't that the best part of every pasta dish?  As good as our choices were, I think Karina wins the best order award.  Her pasta special of bucatini with stinging nettle pesto was incredible.  I don't know what a stinging nettle is other than the waiter's description of it as an "herbaceous plant," which didn't help much.  What I do know is that once pureed with pine nuts into a pesto, it has a deep uber-spinach-y flavor that I loved.

When it came to dessert we were originally only getting one scoop of olive oil gelato for all four of us.  Somehow that turned into three full-fledged desserts and I'm not sorry at all.  We stuck with the gelato, ordering a scoop of olive oil and a scoop of salty peanut.  Olive oil gelato seems to be the vanilla ice cream of Italy that makes vanilla seem irrelevant.  Next we ordered a polenta cake filled with dried fruit and served with whipped ricotta.  Why whip cream when you could whip ricotta?  Finally, we ordered banana gelato served on top of a brownie and covered with a shell of caramelized white chocolate and salted peanuts.  This was probably my favorite.  When you read the description, it doesn't sound all that much different from what you serve in mass quantities at a sleepover, but they just make it better.

There's just something about a restaurant that is beloved by 19-year-old college kids, 50-year-old yuppies, and everything in between.  When you see a mix of sweatshirts and ties, you know that it's not trendy, it's tried-and-true.