Hold Your Horses

On a recent Friday night, as the prime-time evening rush was starting to subside, I dined with Harry Styles and Zoë Kravitz, the are-they-or-aren’t-they couple of the moment. He, Errol Flynn–ish with his new mustache, and she, doe-eyed and sylphlike, were at a table in the back. I was at a window seat up front, but why split hairs? We all wanted to be at I Cavallini.

“The little horses,” as the name translates, is the ten-years-later follow-up to the Four Horsemen, the demi-size, sneakily ambitious wine bar that helped uncap natural wine as a New York phenomenon. Chef Nick Curtola’s small plates at the Four Horsemen — “4H,” as it’s called by the cognoscenti — were inventive but approachable, far-reaching and freely borrowing. (Curtola credits California roots and European training for the mix, which sometimes leaned Spanish, other times Italian, often Japanese.) One of the restaurant’s partners is LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, but it quickly outran any blot of celebrity–restaurant status. 4H made horse girls of us all.

A decade is a long time to wait for a sequel to a smash success, and the weight of anticipation is heavy. As it is, I Cavallini has an impossible task. It must instantly be the best and the most interesting. It is, in actuality, a warmer, cozier proposition: a neighborhood spot. It would be impossible for I Cavallini to escape its sibling’s long shadow. Literally, as it’s right across the street. The same partners run both: Curtola oversees the kitchens. Murphy remains the paterfamilias. Amanda McMillan, the managing director and partner (and, for transparency’s sake, a longtime friend from before either of us worked in food), regularly scurries between the two. Justin Chearno, the restaurants’ wine evangelist, had been working on the list before his untimely death last year; Flo Barth, one of his old deputies, is now stewarding an all-Italian list in his image and memory.

But there are signal differences, too. Twice the room means roughly half the fuss. The old Fiore space has been apportioned and slightly shrunken with little glassed-in booths carved out of a wide-open barroom and the ceiling dropped to snug it all up. The art on the walls is by staff and friends (including Stacy Fisher, Chearno’s widow) and telephone-wire light fixtures in candy-apple red lend a bit of ’80s Italo-Mod. Both the front room, with a wraparound minibar, and the long proper bar in the second of the three rooms are held for walk-ins, though at this point, the more apt description may be “for those willing to wait.” That long bar possesses the full cocktail capabilities the Four Horsemen doesn’t and is overseen by Jojo Colonna, formerly of Attaboy, who gussies up spritzes with fino sherry and gin with Sungold tomatoes.

The food I had was never less than good and occasionally outright wonderful. The menu is divided into antipasti, salads, pasta, and secondi, and each section is split, more or less evenly, between trattoria traditional and hints of Horsemen. On a few visits, I found a mix-and-match approach to these divergent styles worked best. Opening chatter has landed on an antipasto salad of nervetti — beef tendons, euphemized for those not already converted to them by the city’s many hot-pot establishments — where the tendons are boiled to a jellied chaw and served cold with their own aspic, sweet onions, and a gentle chive-blossom vinaigrette. They’re delicious, a cool, lightly bracing workout of a starter, though the same tendons are served with more fireworks across the street, where they’re fried to crackling and served on top of punchy beef tartare. I enjoyed Curtola’s eel toasts just as much, a fine addition to an eel mini-craze gripping the city, the seafood fried in a light, puffy batter and served, in a twist on the Sicilian pasta con le sarde combination, with pine nuts and golden raisins.

There are a number of dishes on the menu that tickle in this way. My favorite pasta was farfallone in Calabrian-chile butter — giant bow ties, the size and shape of a skinny pack of Vogue cigarettes — whose crisped batons of pancetta gave the dish a smoky surprise. Little gnocchetti swim alongside Zolfini beans in a deeply shrimpy broth with a light, clear flavor of the sea.

But the word I scribbled over and over in my notebook was reduction. It’s not so much that Curtola’s dishes are simple but that he has a kind of stalwart confidence in their own essential flavors and a stubborn unwillingness to dress them up. Sometimes I wished he would. His chicken, served golden, flattened, and in six sectioned pieces (one still bearing a claw), was very chicken. A special of Denver steak was just that, served with a side of grilled peppers, which were just those. (I did love the roasted-onion-butter slathered over the meat.) His pesto is a very good pesto — less oily than most, almost saladlike — and about as Platonically pesto as it gets.

Whether you want purity or palimpsest in your restaurant meals is up to you. At the Four Horsemen, much of the fun derives from unexpected combinations of ingredients and flavors. At I Cavallini, it’s as if the dishes followed Coco Chanel’s famous (and likely apocryphal) injunction to take one accessory off before leaving the house. Then again, complication is not its own reward. Whether Harry sticks around after the hype subsides is anyone’s guess. But I’ll be back, and if it’s not here, I’ll see him at the next one, I’m sure.