I spent most of July on planes to Rome and Los Angeles, trains from Montauk and Milan and in a car from Colorado to Utah. It’s August now and I’m back in New York, where I jog and I buy butter and touch all of the fruit at the farmer’s market until something feels good enough to take home. I take cold bites of fuzzy peaches straight from the fridge and pop small, sunny tomatoes into my mouth each time I pass the plate of them I keep on my dining room table. My knives are sticky all the time, there’s always a cutting board on the counter and a half bottle of wine sitting around.
This week was the first this month that I went out to dinner a few times. A friend texted me for help with a fun date —where could he take her for the best vodka sauce in the city? I had ideas, but wanted to check if some old favorites were still as good as my memories were telling me they were. So I ventured downtown, where a lot of the best vodka sauce is, and ate tomatoes in restaurants instead of my apartment, lots of them, cooked down with cream and butter, tossed with short noodles. These were my favorites.
Carbone is still virtually impossible to get into, but the vodka sauce is worth trying. This sauce, which Calabrian chilis make just spicy enough, is glossy and buttery, and firmly sits on the very fine line between too much tomato and too much cream. I also love the short rigatoni shape that gets to bathe in it. That shape, and a chewier, spiral rotini noodle can also be ordered at Parm, another Major Food Group restaurant that is exponentially easier to get into. You can make reservations at all of the locations, except for the oldest on Mulberry, which is of course the one that feels the least like a chain and the most like one of those mob spots further down the street. The wait is never too terrible, though, and there’s plenty of places to shop or drink while you do. They say the sauce is the same recipe as Carbone’s, and it is delicious, but I’ll say what none of us want to hear: things taste better when you haven’t been able to get your hands on them for a long time.
I still get nervous every time I have to ask for a table at Emilio’s Ballato. I’ve been turned away and quoted many hours-long waits, but their food is so good that I take a deep breath and remember what someone’s therapist once told them about something much more serious: be afraid and do it anyway. Whenever I do make it inside, the perfectly cooked off-menu penne alla vodka is always on my table and sometimes the also off-menu veal parm with vodka sauce and prosciutto is too. I told my friend if he could get through the door here his date would fall pretty fast.
Cafe Spaghetti’s vodka pasta isn’t exactly off-menu, but it’s only on their brunch and lunch menus. They run it as a dinner special often, sometimes with cavatelli or tortellini, usually with fat rigatoni noodles. I’ve had it with spicy pork sausage crumbled in, too. I know it’s a bit of a gamble, but their vodka sauce is so tangy and buttery that I’m always willing to take those odds.
I grew up going to birthday dinners at Caffé Buon Gusto every month. Any girl in my high school class could tell you how special the bowls of pasta here are, particularly the thin spaghetti (though they let you pair any sauce with any shape) soaked in rich, almost too-creamy vodka sauce and sprinkled with tiny, uneven cubes of fresh mozzarella that melts into each bite. These days, you’ll probably spot someone ordering by showing their server a video on their phone or shining their very bright phone flashlight onto their pasta, but this is still very much a spot for Upper East Side families and tweens to come for simple, perfect Italian food.
Bar Pitti’s eponymous Rigatoni Pitti dish probably shouldn’t count as a vodka sauce, especially when you consider that it has turkey sausage and peas in it. But the creamy tomato sauce does have that pink-orange hue, and it clings so nicely to the wavy ridges in the rigatoni, and it’s so damn delicious that I’m giving it a spot on this list. Plus, sharing a bowl of it and a bottle of red wine at a sidewalk table on a breezy summer night is a lovely date.
I ate at Arthur and Sons for the first time this summer and couldn’t help but think of it as a yassified Carmine’s. It’s perpetually packed but still pretty easy to book a reservation at, the portions are huge, and the decor is very, uh, red — the glassware, the checkered tablecloths, the logos printed on every dish, the booths, the outdoor tables and chairs. Most of the food is covered in a thick layer of melted mozzarella or mountain of salty parmesan, which is to say, it’s all very good, especially the spicy vodka pasta. The sauce is so sharp and salty, almost cheesy, it tastes like the cook melted a ton of parmesan into it before tossing in the rigatoni. It’s such a perfect version of the dish that I had to include it here, despite it not exactly being the best date spot.
RUMOR HAS IT
My dad had the rigatoni alla vodka from Peasant this week and said it was outstanding. I heard from my friend
that Vinny’s of Carroll Gardens — a spot I have shamefully never been to — serves a tomato-heavy, and generous portion of, penne alla vodka. Il Cantinori’s pasta trio includes an alla vodka, but I don’t like that the shape is always changing and that it costs $50. I’ll probably check it out soon anyways.Lindsay
PIZZA ALLA VODKA
I appreciate my friend’s dedication to the vodka sauce bit, but most of the homey Italian meals above are ones you’d want to eat anchovies and garlic and a little bit too much pasta during. It’s not the ideal experience to share with someone you’re trying to look gorgeous and be pleasant with for the very first time. So I also suggested the following places to him, where him and his date could still enjoy a vodka sauce-centric meal, but in pizza form, which is naturally lighter and more casual than a full-fledged Sunday supper.
