The rain has finally started to fall in NYC and the city has turned grey as it does every year around this time. My heart is heavy and my life unsettled but I am trying to pick up the pieces in the wake of this summer’s tsunami.*

Friends have been reaching out, lending support, sometimes with an email letting me know that they think of me, sometimes with an invitation to dinner and/or a bottle of wine, checking in and catching up.

Ben Shapiro — an old buddy, a great drummer, and radio producer, cinematographer, and journalist — wrote me the other day and we made a date to check out one of the many new downtown places.

I wasn’t inclined to like Gemma. I figured it would be another Da Silvano, Morandi, etc. rip-off, yet another Disneylandish, faux trattoria. And frankly, The New York Times food critic Frank Bruni wasn’t too off the mark when he wrote that Gemma is “a cheat sheet of a restaurant whose proprietors take fewer risks than a hurricane-insurance agent in Nebraska.”

Above, you’ve seen it before: faux trattoria chic. It’s like dining in Fantasyland… Europe via Anaheim.

So, when I arrived (shortly before Ben), and sat at the bar where I chatted briefly with NYC restaurateur Chris Cannon (my only pseudo-star siting), I decided to get right down to business.

“Do you have any white wine that doesn’t see new wood?” I asked the bartender. And I was pleasantly surprised when he said, “Yes, of course, I’ve got a beautiful stainless-steel Sauvignon.”

He proceeded to pour a fresh and delightful 2006 Sauvignon Blanc by Poggio Salvi (who makes both barriqued and traditional wines, btw). You don’t commonly find bartenders with such wine knowledge in places like this, let alone someone who can appreciate that there are those of us who don’t like oaked wine. (In his column this week, The New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov pointed out rightly that “Oaky may be bad, but oak is good.” I may have tempered that by saying “but oak can be good.” Nonetheless, I was glad to see such a widely read authority like Eric tackle such a sticky subject.)

Ben arrived and we decided to let our bartender order for us: excellent Quattro Stagioni pizzas and a simply gorgeous bottle of 1999 Brunello di Montalcino by La Torre, a winemaker you don’t see very often in the U.S. (I remember it from my days in Bagno Vignoni where I first learned about Brunello nearly twenty years ago with my friends, the Marcucci brothers). Traditional in style, this wine had natural fruit on the nose and in the mouth, bright acidity and tannins that probably could have used a few more years in bottle. Case, our bartender, insisted on decanting the wine for us and the aeration helped it to open up.

Above: the Quattro Stagioni pizza at Gemma, I have to say, was among the most authentic Italian pizza I’ve had in NYC. The crust was light but crispy and firm, the topping savory but not overly salty.

Truth be told, the list at Gemma isn’t exactly overflowing with wines that I like (at the end of the night, one of the sommeliers poured us a barriqued Aglianico del Vulture that tasted like industrial coffee syrup). But there are some true gems at Gemma, like a 2006 Verdicchio dei Castelli di Iesi by Villa Bucci (one of my all-time favs).

But what made the night was a great bartender, who knew his stuff and who understood my palate from the moment I sat down. Maybe Frank should have eaten at the bar.

Above: Case Newcomb, a great bartender and this man’s best friend at Gemma. Pour me some Brunello and I’ll tell you some lies.

*This old earthquake’s gonna leave me in the poor house.
It seems like this whole town’s insane.

— Gram Parsons

New York is one of the great restaurant cities of the world. So many restaurants and wine bars open and close so quickly in this town, that it’s often hard to keep track. And while there is a lot of great food here, there’s plenty of bad to go around as well. I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands lately and no kitchen to cook in, so I’ve taken the opportunity to try some new — well, new for me — places.

Above: the only thing I liked about Quality Meats was a few interesting wines on the list, including this Caillou Blanc 2004 Château Talbot.

A few nights ago, Greg and I — we’re both steak lovers — dined at Quality Meats, a recent addition to the Smith & Wollensky mediocrity group. The decor was kinda cool: the restaurant is dressed as a old-school meat locker, with hooks on the ceiling etc.

Our gracious waiter — who later abandoned us when the restaurant got busy — recommended that we not order the rib steak for two (“it can be too fatty,” she said) and so we both ordered the sirloin, bone in, black and blue. Greg’s came so charred that he said it tasted like charcoal. Mine was medium rare and not charred at all on the outside. We also both ordered Caesar salads: the dressing was insipid (“no anchovy,” our waiter said) and the croutons store-bought.

While the wine list was laden with the classic, over-priced, over-oaked, and overblown “Napa Cabs,” there were a few interesting wines like Sinskey, Olga Raffault (we drank the 2002 Les Picasses at a really great price), and a wine I’d never had, Caillou Blanc 2004 Château Talbot, a white made from Sauvignon and Sémillon. You rarely see white Bordeaux in NYC and Greg and I immensely enjoyed this dry, structured wine.

Above: the chef at Centro Vinoteca needs some Italian lessons.

Another recent outing took me to the very new Centro Vinoteca in the Village to meet a good friend of a friend, Ariel, who has just joined the ranks of us wine professionals. I really wanted to like Centro Vinoteca: the list is all Italian and has some great stuff, including a Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico Superiore Vigna delle Oche 2002 San Lorenzo that was fantastic. I got there early (about 5:50 p.m.) and the place was empty and I sat at the bar. My waiter was knowledgeable and skilled and was happy to open a new bottle for me when I told him the wine he had poured — open from the night before — was dead. They serve wines by the quartino there and the prices are very reasonable for the quality (“wine by the quartino,” equivalent to roughly 2.5 glasses depending on how you pour, is a Batali-Bastianich affectation, but more on that below).

But by the time Ariel arrived, about 20 minutes later, the place was packed, we lost our good waiter, and our new waiter simply didn’t know how to open a bottle of wine. Ariel wanted to try the Verdicchio and so our new waiter opened it by swirling the bottle around to rip the capsule off; she inserted the worm incorrectly and broke the cork as she pulled it out; and then — to my disbelief — she inserted the worm again, put the bottle between her knees (!!!), and ripped the cork out. After Ariel tasted the wine and opted instead for a Falanghina, the waiter poured the Falanghina into the Verdicchio glass. Oy…

Trying to move past this mishap, we did order a few things from the menu. The arancine (above) turned out not to be arancine but just simple fried rice balls dusted with some grated pecorino. Throughout Italy, arancini (masc.) are fried rice balls stuffed with meat, cheese, and/or peas. A classic Sicilian dish, the are called arancine (fem.) in Palermo and Western Sicily, arancini (masc.) in eastern Sicily and the rest of Italy.

We also ordered — partly because it seemed so preposterous — the mortadella pate [sic]. I guess the person who types up their menus doesn’t know how to use diacritics. This dish consisted of ground mortadella. I know that mortadella is “in” these days but why ruin it by destroying its texture?

My first waiter, whom I liked, mentioned that the chef at Centro Vinoteca had been Mario Batali’s sous chef on the Iron Chef TV show. Evidently she learned a lot from Molto “make-it-up-as-you-go-along-and-then-claim-it’s-authentic-Italian-food” Mario. The so-called quartino is another Batali-Bastianich affectation that you never see in Italy. It’s really too bad… I really wanted to like Centro Vinoteca. The wine list there is interesting but the service and the affectation just ruined it for me.