Worth A Try
TLDR: If you can get into L’Artusi, you won’t be sorry. Excellent pastas abound and delight, reminding you why pasta is so damn good in the first place.
Ah pasta. A deceptively simple food – who hasn’t made a last minute dinner boiling some Barilla and slathering it in butter or oil? It’s so good at home, I sometimes forgo pasta at restaurants because, hey, I could make that.
L’Artusi exists to remind you that, no, you did not make that. And YES pasta is amazing. God I love pasta.
There’s a reason that this restaurant is so hard to get into. Though the menu is simple, the execution is excellent. Perfectly dressed salad, perfectly al dente, bouncy pasta. I didn’t get the opportunity to try the other appetizers or mains because getting in here once at a normal dinner hour was about 3 years in the making, but I have faith the rest of the menu is equally well done.
Specifically, the pasta really reminded me of why I love pasta – it’s so versatile. I had the crab bucatini, lamb ragu cavatelli, and mushroom garganelli, and they were all delightful and completely different from each other. My favorite (by a hair) was the bucatini. It packed a spicy seafood punch without being overwhelmingly fishy, plus had a nice little crunch from breadcrumbs on top.
The downside of L’Artusi is the wait. If you’re willing to play the reservation game, you can likely snag a spot (as I did), but you might not get the best table (I had to sit outside in winter under a blasting heater, not so cute). I loved the pasta, but there’s a lot of good pasta in the city, so while L’Artusi is worth a pin on your hit list, I wouldn’t drive yourself crazy trying to land a meal here.
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