Whipped Ricotta on the Third Floor of a Mall
Quality Branded's Italian-American theater piece sits above Columbus Circle with Central Park in the windows and a $165 shellfish tower on the menu. The room does its job. The kitchen half does.
The whipped ricotta arrives with a drizzle of black truffle honey and a small ceremony around it, which is either absurd or exactly right depending on how you feel about eating dip on the third floor of a shopping mall. It is very good. The honey is real, the ricotta is aerated to the point of being nearly a mousse, and the bread comes out warm. You take an escalator to get here. You pass a Whole Foods on the way up.
This is Quality Branded's Italian-American swing at the Central Park view — a big, loud, magenta-lit room on the third floor of Deutsche Bank Center, where the plating is built for the phone before it's built for the eater. Nick Gaube's name attaches to it. It reads as a group operation more than a chef's project, and that's fair. The point is scale, energy, and the windows. On the food, the point is: order carefully.
A room built for the view and the photograph, attached to a kitchen that lands half its plates and charges for all of them.
Editorial Deep
The ricotta lands first, whipped to the texture of stiff whipped cream, with a shallow pool of black truffle honey and warm bread beside it. This one earns the fuss. The yellowtail crudo, when it comes, is cold and clean and cut against charred grapefruit and pistachio — the acid does what it's meant to. So far so good.
You can hear the person across from you at seven. By nine on a Saturday you're leaning in and repeating the wine order, which is the room doing what a room like this is designed to do — fill, hold energy, turn once. The music sits under conversation until it doesn't, and the volume climbs with the crowd rather than with the speakers.
Officially, Bad Roman is on OpenTable and takes reservations like a normal Manhattan restaurant. In practice, the desirable slots — 7 to 8:30, Thursday through Saturday — move fast, and the drop is less punishing than at a smaller room only because the room is large. The workaround worth knowing: if you're already at The Shops at Columbus Circle, walk up to the host stand and ask to book in person. It reads as a small courtesy and it works more often than the OpenTable calendar suggests. The other move is the bar, which takes walk-ins and where Sunday night is the softest landing in the week.
What the money buys here that it doesn't buy at Don Angie is the room: the scale, the view, the theater of a $165 tower arriving under a spotlight. That's a real thing to buy, and the article is not going to pretend it isn't. But the specific line item that is overpriced is the Shellfish Tower, which is a scene tax dressed as seafood. The under-priced one is the babka at $8, which is genuinely good bread.
The return case runs into one currently-unmet condition: the kitchen would need to raise its floor. Right now the ceiling plates — the ricotta, the ravioli, the yellowtail — are good enough that you understand why the room is full, and the median plate is competent enough that you don't send anything back. But there's no dish that would pull anyone across town who wasn't already going to be at Columbus Circle, and at these prices there should be. If a new menu tightened the raw bar and gave the pastas a second push, this becomes a real Upper West Side option rather than a convenient one.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Whipped ricotta with black truffle honey; filet with cacio e pepe ravioli; skip the salmon crudo
“A room built for the view, attached to a kitchen that lands half its plates.”
Go for the ricotta, the ravioli and the Central Park windows on a Sunday night at the bar. For a serious modern Italian-American dinner at this price, Don Angie is doing the same job on a tighter menu and it's the redirect worth taking.
The Verdict
