Squid ink fettuccine
As a tourist destination, the past is just fantastic. One past setting I love to visit is New York in the '40s and '50s, when the Irish bars were full of Irish, and Italian restaurants were owned by Italian-speakers, with mamma or nonna running the kitchen.
Mammas and nonnas are in somewhat shorter supply here in modern-day Middle Tennessee, where our Italian food was long limited to red-sauce spaghetti, piccata and pizza. My first experience with fine American-Italian was during a 1990 trip to New York's La Lanterna — not a famous place, but that's the point. It was just a nice place serving stonkingly good classic Abruzzese-inflected food. (And still is, apparently.)
That's the vibe at Trattoria il Mulino, recently opened in the downtown Hilton. From the breadbasket to the piccata and branzino, your dreams of classic New York Italian food are faithful to the original, because classics don't go out of style.
Since space is no object in convention hotels, Il Mulino spreads over 4,500 square feet. An attractive grid divider breaks the space into a manageable scale, with tables lit in soft pools of light and noise lightly muffled by carpets on the brick floor. It's hard to imagine that just yards away from the table where you and your companions are clinking cocktail glasses, there are jorts-clad throngs waiting at Fifth Avenue to cross Broadway.
The steady hand of executive chef Tom Cook turns out a good salad of blood oranges and beets with greens, and firm, tender calamari cut into bands, lightly fried and served over a slash of lightly cooked sauce that tastes of pure tomatoes, olive oil and seasonings. Squid ink artisan-style pasta winds around morsels of octopus, fresh tomato and arugula. Veal piccata is a good version of the classic (high-five for the extra capers), though if Nonna were cooking, she might have taken it out of the skillet sooner.
From il mare, you can choose trout, salmon, branzino, snapper, shrimp or halibut cooked in one of several of ways: oreganato, fra diavolo, Mediterranean (capers and olives), meuniere, francese, marichiara. The last features big, plump clams and mussels in shells in a lightly cooked tomato sauce, a flavorful blanket for any fish.
There are lots of different ways to make chicken scarpariello — many recipes include pickled hot peppers, while some use bell peppers and some use spicy Italian sausage. Mulino's scarpariello features chicken thigh meat in a sharp, lemony sauce with abundant mushrooms, less adorned than some versions but very good in its restraint, if you aren't expecting peppers and sausage.
A good trattoria's appeal is that the food is great whether you order simple or sophisticated — even the familiar fare should be well-executed and taste good. That's generally true at Il Mulino, with a couple of exceptions. The bar menu, for instance, should have taken a cue from the dinner menu and stuck to mid-century classics. The muddled list overreaches in improving and reinterpreting straightforward drinks. The Godfather Manhattan isn't improved with cherry liqueur, and the "Italian mojito" of gin, Tuaca, grenadine, lime and mint doesn't taste any better than it sounds.
A meatball sub of four colossal meatballs in a long split roll is a sandwich in name only — I can't imagine picking it up or biting into it, but that's not my objection. The problem, rather, was the pale, bready meatballs. They were better left over the next day, like so many peasanty foods are, but I wouldn't order the sub again. The gnocchi were exactly the wrong texture — firm is nice, and so is tender, but rubbery? Not so much.
For a big-name New York restaurant, I expected a fuller house, even in this big room. Nashvillians are still coming around to hotel dining. Plus, stiff competition downtown probably siphons off potential customers — if Trattoria il Mulino were in Green Hills, there'd likely be a line out the door. So put it on your list — it makes for a nice trip to a food era that's never gone out of style in my book.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com
