On the Juice

Rittenhouse's Di Vino is the ideal wine bar.

by Trey Popp

Michael T. Regan SQUARE DANCE: The 19th Street façade of Filiberto Magnati's Di Vino Wine Bar & Restaurant.

In a perfect world, wine bars would not be allowed to display menus in those little window boxes mounted beside their front doors. The law would require proprietors to post their résumés instead. The section listing personal qualities would have to be printed in boldface. Only then could potential customers sort through all the chaff — "detail-oriented," "team player," "goal-driven" — to find the most important characteristic in the business: "Bores easily."

That's a dangerous thing in a restaurant, where consistency is king. It's not even ideal in your corner pub, where a body should be able to bask in the comfort of timeworn routine. But a wine bar is different. A wine bar should be a place of experimentation and unexpected discoveries. If you sit down and order your favorite California Cabernet, the place has already failed you before the glass hits your lips.

So kudos to Filiberto Magnati, who opened Di Vino Wine Bar & Restaurant half a block south of Rittenhouse Square in October. The 25-year-old native of Milan may have picked the worst time in decades to mark up bottles of first-growth Bordeaux, but he's got the perfect temperament for the job. There are more wines off the menu than on it, and the former sommelier at Gulph Mills' Savona is bent on changing his inventory constantly.

More to the point, he's bent on sharing it. His small staff was so quick to pour free tastes when I visited that it almost seemed mandatory, and their relaxed attitude made it easy to turn down anything that didn't strike close enough to the bull's eye. Then, when it was all over and the check had been settled, Magnati brought out four complimentary glasses of an 11-year-old Amarone that retails for $80 a bottle. I've brushed a lot of purple stains off my teeth over the years, but that's one Italian variety I'd never encountered. I don't know how it would have paired with a human liver and fava beans, as Hannibal Lecter relished it in the book version of Silence of the Lambs, but the high-octane, port-like red made for a heady follow-up to dessert.

Yet don't let that give you the impression that Di Vino is only a place for the deep-pocketed. It's not. When I asked Magnati to name his favorite wine in the place, he deflected the question. "I have wines that cost $6 a glass and wines that cost $55 a glass," he said. What's the point of narrowing it down to just one? Furthermore, considering the number of opportunities we gave him to fill our oversize stemware with the priciest juice on the list, I was frankly surprised to receive a bill in which half the wines were between $7 and $10 and none was more than $15. What a pleasure to be taken care of by someone more eager to plug a good bargain than to milk a big markup.

Next to the exceptionally congenial and nearly flawless wine service, Di Vino's food comes across as second-fiddle. Aside from a fantastic foursome of lamb chops whose savory juices permeated a bed of mixed greens and toasted pine nuts to stellar effect, the dishes I tried were more prone to clumsiness than inspiration. Sometimes small mistakes had regrettably large consequences. An overdose of truffle oil marred a promising spread of duck breast slices and beets; the beef carpaccio was utterly swamped by lemon juice; and the deep-fried risotto balls weren't risotto, they were rice.

But the kitchen more or less lives up to a menu whose main category is "Snacks." The homemade grissini — breadstick crackers dressed lightly with white-truffle butter and wrapped with excellent prosciutto — made for excellent drinking fodder, as did a bruschetta topped with a pleasantly acidic artichoke salad. I also liked the simplicity of bay scallops on mixed greens, which could be the perfect shellfish for the strapped budgets of the Great Recession.

And that's the real challenge Di Vino is facing. "I haven't seen business go down," Magnati quipped on a night when only three tables were filled in his handsomely refurbished nook, "because business was bad from the beginning." Already, the menu he envisioned just three months ago — oysters with yuzu foam, sweetbreads with Stilton emulsion, a $65 Dover sole for two — has shrunk considerably in terms of ambition and price. So I'm inclined to cut the kitchen a little slack as they try to find a formula that works. Magnati gets the wine part of the equation so right that I'd hate to see him take his résumé anywhere else.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

Di Vino Wine Bar & Restaurant | 267 S. 19th St., 215-545-0441

Hours: Mon.-Sat., 5-10:30 p.m.; closed Sun.

Smaller plates, $4-$10 Larger plates, $11-$39