Harry Cipriani: Twice in Love with Harry

          “It’s like I’m in love,” marvels Arrigo Cipriani, discreet authority totem in double-breasted midnight blue, warm but dignified– indeed, perhaps somewhat shy. In love? Why not? Tout New York, the high and the flighty, is in love with Harry–Harry Cipriani–New World spore of Venice’s legendary Harry’s Bar.

          From that instant in November when the revolving door made its first counter-clockwise turn, the house has been booked tight, anchovy-packed, full of ciao-darlings, flashy parvenus, grandes dames, and leggy beauties with wild manes and flying pelts, bemused moguls in tow. It’s like a party page in W come alive, with publisher John Fairchild center right almost every day at lunch.

          Overnight, Harry’s is hot. And gastronomic ecstasy is not the magnet; it’s effortless eating (luncheonette fare and homey Italian grub), a nutritional excuse to crowd into what may be the least comfortable spot in town, hoping to bask in the festive dazzle. VIP-lock tends to jam the entrance. Sables tangle. Attaché cases collide. Where to go? Displaced glitterati and the brassy claque they attract are already three-deep at the tiny bar sipping the peach-nectared champagne Bellini, a Harry’s Bar invention. Waiters whirl and feint in nonexistent aisles, shifting service tables, bumping, dodging, tripping.

          The stretched-fabric walls give off a soft peach glow against gleaming cherry-wood, and if the tables seem awkwardly low, that’s a clever ploy to make a too low ceiling seem higher. So what if the food is merely good, not always the equal of the hometown Harrys? So what if it’s expensive? That’s familiar, too.

          For those of us who can never get enough of Venice, it’s bliss to have Harry’s baked green noodles slivered with prosciutto or a soupy sludge of zucchini-and-broccoli-studded risotto or such neglected notions as scallops thermidor and chicken cacciatore–straightforward, unfashionable, not a shitake spear or a radicchio curl or a kiwi lurking anywhere.

          Does Arrigo miss the exotic sea critters of the Adriatic? Never. “I’m finding everything I need at the Fulton Fish Market,” he reports, and “in New york, the liver is actually better.” There are no mile-high pepper mills or outsize plates, just ambitious prices–pasta $14 to $18 and entrées $25 to $26 at dinner, but slightly lower at lunch. (The menu changes daily; two or three set menus propose four courses at somewhat leaner prices.)

          There are careless lapses. A wan minestrone, flat as dishwater. Fairly pedestrian onion soup, distinctly oversalted. Rather stark carpaccio. Homemade white noodles tossed with shrimp and stirred with tomato, a ho-hum notion. And shockingly soggy veal Milanese. But almost everything else is carefully cooked and full of flavor. Thick pasta-and-bean soup is earthy and grand. A buttery mound of ravioli is a pleasant reminder of what ravioli once were before they went nouvelle chichi. A fast sauté of calf’s liver in thin curls is tender and pink, the onions soft and sweet. Impeccably fried sea bass is delicious under a mantle of crisp steamed artichoke leaves.

          The house is justly proud of its home-baked bread, a crisp, rolled and layered compromise between puff pastry and a Parker House roll, and Harry’s makes a lovely, aristocratic, pita-like frame for its lunchtime club sandwich–a tangle of chicken, half-cooked bacon, lettuce, and pallid tomato with sublime mayonnaise. The same fine bread wraps the giant sirloin burger, touted by W in a blow-up color photo with the affection W usually reserves for Pat Buckley. Fried free-ranging chicken is boneless breaded nuggets reminiscent of lapses committed by Chinese restaurants in suburban shopping malls.

          With a staff rotating from Venice and culled from local veterans you may recognize–two or three recognized me–the serving team radiates a certain spiff. (That lean, baby-faced young man is Arrigo’s son, Giuseppe, who stayed behind when Dad went home for Christmas.) But it takes four requests to get a glass of water, and why aperitif glasses are never cleared is a mystery. Our man navigates the treacherously crowded space with endless goodwill, actually thanking us “for letting me know” when we send back too tepid fried scallops. Returned hot from the fire, they are the best taste of the evening, fresh and sweet in a tasty batter with tangy tartar dipping sauce.

          To my eye, desserts here look as blowsy and sweet as they taste, even the lemon-meringue pie, but the chocolate-on-chocolate cake with its lining of raspberry jam is splendid, sweet as it is, and the lemon sorbetto is a winner.

          No room at lunch? Stop by for breakfast. The one flaw in Arrigo Cipriani’s love affair with New York is that the Sherry-Netherland insists he delivery room service and breakfast, a distracting obligation. I can’t promise serious chic at that early hour, but start the day with a Bellini and you may not care.

781 Fifth Avenue, near 59th Street