Buzz Words

Is Barbuzzo the best new restaurant in Philly?

by Adam Erace

SPHERES OF INFLUENCE: Barbuzzo's signature light-as-air meatballs are flavored with fennel, coriander, red chili flakes and chopped cornichons, and stuffed with sharp caciocavallo cheese.

[ review ]

The last entry on George Sabatino's blog, georgesabatino.com, is dated July 19. "I went from the bad kind of really busy to the wonderful kind of really busy recently," he wrote. "Barbuzzo is around the corner and we have been able to get into the kitchen this past week."

Food porn pics follow — pig's feet, sausages, fresh fior di latte like round lotus blossoms in a pot of cloudy water — with Sabatino listing the salumi he would craft. Four months later, some are ready and some are still curing, but Barbuzzo, the fourth restaurant in Marcie Turney and Valerie Safran's 13th Street empire, is open and thriving, and Sabatino hasn't updated since. As Turney's right-hand man, the chef de cuisine has likely reached a whole new level of busy.

Effortless, exciting and affordable, Barbuzzo is so primally satisfying that you're planning a return visit before you even finish dessert. I went on a Sunday and returned the following night. My two-time server chuckled while pouring the house-bottled water: "We've been seeing a lot of that lately."

Lolita, Bindi and Grocery, Turney and Safran's other eateries, have always been very good — Sabatino came from Bindi, executive sous chef Nikki Hill from Grocery — but have they ever ranked among the city's best restaurants? Barbuzzo does. It feels so right, maybe because Mediterranean is the cuisine Turney, whose first gig was Audrey Claire, has always loved to cook. She's in the kitchen with Sabatino and Hill, turning out seasonal small plates with a bordering-on-reverential respect for ingredients. Every ooh and ahh you've heard about Barbuzzo's food, from glass-brittle "pig popcorn" chiccharones dusted in espelette pepper to the dreamy budino tucked layer by salted-caramel layer into a Mason jar, is a million percent true.

Local greens are anointed with Italian oils and salves (vin cotto on one salad, saba on another). Root vegetables are exhumed from ground and raised on pedestals. Green Meadow pigs become lardo, guanciale, sausage — find each on a pizza — and, with the help of some ground short rib, a pair of meatballs so light they'd float off their cast-iron skillet were it not for the caper-studded red pepper relish holding them down.

"George must have made meatballs 20 times," Turney laughed during our interview. "I wanted the meatballs to be that dish people would come back for." Mission accomplished. As if these orbs weren't boldly seasoned enough — count fennel, coriander, red chili flake and chopped cornichons among their mix-ins — Sabatino stuffs each with caciocavallo, a sharp Sicilian cow's milk cheese that becomes the meatball's molten core.

But there's so much more I'd go back for — like pasta, all made in-house. Hill's sheer ricotta-and-caciocavallo ravioli, slicked with brown butter; tender twists of strozzapreti buried under black walnut pesto, perked with preserved lemon. The breadcrumb-dusted crock of sautéed escarole and rainbow chard, flamed with Calabrese chilies and pickled long-hots. A wild arugula salad, celebrating autumn with wood-roasted neck pumpkin (butternut's big daddy) and parsnips, clove- and cinnamon-spiced pumpkin seeds and shards of nutty Grana Padano.

Depending on where you're seated, Barbuzzo can be about as comfortable as a straitjacket. Go for the dove-gray marble bar and chef's counter, whose stools are spacious compared to the dining room's bowling lane of cramped tables. But like fresh lemonade, the cooking is definitely worth the squeeze. And good on the contortionist servers! They twist their way through the Tetris game with agility and discretion, balancing oblong pizza pies and sage-suffused Concord Sage Crush cocktails, managing to be unobtrusive while never more than a foot or so away. 

While the layout channels a razor clam, the modern-farmhouse look channels the agriturismo Turney and Safran stayed at in Puglia. They worked with URBANSPACEDEVELOPMENT and architectural salvagers Provenance, who laid down Baltimore pier pilings for the floors, Manayunk dam planks for the bar and Church of the Transfiguration pews for booths. They sourced other fixtures themselves, from the lights (crafted from French wine barrels) to the vintage-looking barn door dominating one wall (crafted by Lowe's).

While most of the food is fantastic, there were some misses among the hits. The burrata arrived with slices of the best pear I've eaten all season (a ruby-red Bartlett), but the cheese was served too cold to appreciate its sweet-creaminess. Crispy skin covered the roasted half-chicken, but sitting the bird in a pool of tangy, herbaceous salsa verde turned it soggy. The almond-milk polenta was so pasty it might as well have been Elmer's-milk polenta.

Fortunately, pizza followed that chicken, and all was forgotten. What pizzaiolo Chris Davis crafts are the "perfect imperfect" pies Turney talks about, unshapely ovals covered in black blisters and bubbles tall enough to camp under. The dough hits the oven floor and cooks in two minutes, rising into "crust with character," with a subtle tang from adding a bit of yesterday's dough to each new batch.

Gossamer sheets of Sabatino's lardo haunt the pie of the same name, a phantom hog trolling the thyme-strewn graveyard of oven-singed artichoke hearts, leeks, hen-of-the-woods mushrooms and fior di latte that's stretched every morning — the most delicious ghost story ever. The Uovo wore a perfectly cooked namesake egg in the center, a white-and-yellow starburst that gave each guanciale-and-Brussels sprout-topped slice an exquisite lushness that (in my mind) closed the conversation on where to find the best pizza in town. It's at Barbuzzo, served with glass vials of crimson Calabrese chili oil and dried sprigs of oregano.

The sensual salted-caramel budino is pastry chef Erin Stafford's best seller, but for me, the icy granitas and sorbets — vivid concord grape one night, invigorating limoncello-mint another — were the refreshing finales Barbuzzo's gutsy, earthy food craves. I'm also in love with her lighter take on tiramisu, a creamy heap of honeyed mascarpone, whipped cream, amaretti cookies and ladyfingers soaked in blood orange reduction and rum. I don't know if she has a blog, but like Sabatino, I'm guessing Barbuzzo will keep her busy long into winter.

(adam.erace@citypaper.net)