Rome, If You Want To

Amis is Marc Vetri at his most casual — but the food's still blow-you-away good.

by Trey Popp

By: Neal Santos

[ review ]

The pilgrims have been coming for almost 12 years now, their tongues tugging them toward Spruce Street like uncanny magnets, like compass needles unhitched from north, like dowsing rods tuned to the treasures of Marc Vetri's kitchen. They've come for milk-simmered, spit-roasted goat. They've come for almond tortellini, asparagus flan, paccheri with scorpionfish. They've come for whatever Vetri has felt like cooking, and gone away murmuring praise the way ants lay down pheromones, marking the trail for the next wave of seekers.

Lately the path has been splitting. It forked when Vetri opened Osteria in 2007, and again this January when he debuted Amis at 13th and Waverly, a couple blocks from the chef's eponymous flagship. He is a regular presence at all three — and at home, where 3-year-old Maurice (picky eater) and not-quite-2-year-old Catherine (gourmand) just got a baby brother — but by necessity a more fleeting one. Now the faithful are encountering an increasingly common sight on their journey: that of Marc Vetri walking away from a restaurant they're walking toward.

So it was on a recent evening in April, the chef striding away from Amis in his white jacket and stubble, leaving Brad Spence in charge. Vetri credits Spence, a longtime presence in his original kitchen, with making Amis a reality. Familiarity must have bred trust: The Roman-style menu Spence executes at this urban trattoria embodies his boss's credo to the fullest degree. As Italian chef Fulvio Pierangelini phrases it, "The more simple the preparation appears, the more attention to detail is needed as the margins of error increase."

The space is tough and muscular, unapologetically urban. Concrete pillars break up the room, exposed ducts crisscross a black ceiling, and metal pipes snake up brick walls. But the exposed bones of this old warehouse are a backdrop for a mixed forest of wood — floorboards as lustrous as shampoo-ad hair, hard-back benches long as church pews, striped laminated tables that toggle between tones beginning at birch and ending just shy of ebony. The hard surfaces conspire to create what amounts to a score of cocoons; you'll be able to hear your tablemates, but servers have to lean in close to impart their well-versed guidance.

As long as it's spring, you'll want to start with vegetables. Any vegetables, really — you will not go wrong — but pray that there are artichokes cooked in the style of the Jews. Hearts stripped bare but for a ring of the tenderest leaves, they are fried first at low temperature to soften them through, then once more at high heat, crisping those leaves brittle and brown. They come out like overturned sunflowers in a color spectrum compressed between olive and auburn. Either you've never had artichokes like these, or you have, in which case you'll be even more eager to eat them again. "It took us a long time to get those right," Vetri says, varying that first round of frying minute by minute. Man, did they whack that mole on the head.

There are thin strands of asparagus, too, roasted until the edges are caramelized and then laid over the lightest spring-onion velouté you can imagine. There are fava beans and English peas, as green as elm leaves unfurling in April, but you can find those and dress them with oil at home. You'll never match the chokes or asparagus.

Order lamb tongues. They are salt-brined for two days, braised on the third, then dipped in egg and bread crumbs on the way to the sauté pan. Four slices the size of checkers come on a bed of salsa rosso that blooms in your mouth with such depth and smoothness you'll wonder what exotic subspecies of red pepper traveled how many thousand miles to be the base of it. Don't ask. You'll feel foolish. "Those?" Vetri will answer. "They're bell peppers. They might have come from Chile."

Frank talk for frank food. "This is the kind of stuff that I make at home," he will tell you. "If you've ever just walked around Rome, they have all these little alleys, with little restaurants that have been open for 30, 40 years. They're all awesome. They all serve really simple things. Roman food for me is really simple food with really strong flavors."

It's also cured meats, not least a coppa that slips over the tongue like microplaned sheets of velour, studded with a few shards of hazelnuts stuck to faint tracks of honey. Amis cures its own, aging it a little less than usual for a mouthfeel that's more dulcet than dry.

These simple preparations occasionally cross into the mundane. There's not much to distinguish an octopus, potato and olive salad from a dozen other good oil-dressed octopus plates around town. The polenta-like semolina gnocchi melts in your mouth, but an overdose of cheese hid the flavor of the oxtail ragu — OK in South Philly, not as thrilling here.

But more often they are as sublime as the creamy pillows of ricotta ravioli, or a tiramisu so fluffy it seemed that a pinprick might deflate it.

There are more things to like. Though desserts are priced as steeply as $10, the rest of the menu brims with single-digit dollar figures. Entrées rarely step out of the teens. You can spend a lot if you want to — especially if you forsake the trim but well-chosen wine list for a beer lineup packed with expensive exotics — but only if you're really bent on it. You could also put together two good dinners at Amis for what might not buy one at Osteria.

Amis also fizzes with a more freewheeling spirit, a kinetic energy that ricochets across the room from the crowded cocktail bar to a track-lit kitchen counter where nibblers munch fried rice balls 3 feet from the chefs. Vetri's third restaurant is a bolder step in the democratization of his culinary aesthetic, and it seems to pulse with the vitality of that project. It's no wonder that so many people were taken in by the announcement of an impending "Vetri on Wheels" food cart that rounded the Web on April Fool's Day. The guru keeps coming further out of the temple, closer to where they live.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

Amis | 412 S. 13th St., 215-732-AMIS, amisphilly.com. Lunch Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m.. Dinner Mon.-Thu., 5-11:30 p.m. (late-night menu 11:30 p.m.-1 a.m.); Fri.-Sat., 5 p.m.-midnight (late-night menu midnight-1 a.m.); Sun., 5-10:30 p.m. (late-night menu 10:30 p.m.-1 a.m.). Brunch Sun., 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Reservations recommended. Wheelchair accessible.