New York City’s Italian dining scene is almost overcrowded. It’s easy to feel lost in the abundance of options. Even if I know my Italian food left and right, by virtue of having grown up with it, I sometimes stutter when they ask me where’s the place where to eat a solida pasta dish. What eatery, which chef, and what neighborhood is the right one to make my New York friend understand what Italian food is all about? LaRina Pastificio & Vino is the answer.
A few steps away from Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, LaRina is the kind of place that you wish you lived close by. It’s the warmly lit restaurant you want to go to on a rainy Wednesday night. It’s the spot you’d want to take a date. It has a lovely patio that begs for midsummer nights, and a retail counter of cheeses, fresh pasta, and Italian products that attracts Italian immigrants when they’re missing tastes of home. The servers will smile and remember your name if you go often enough, and the menu will make you sad that you can’t order everything on it.
Silvia Barban is the Italian chef behind it. I’ve heard people with deep knowledge of the industry describe her as the best Italian chef in New York, and the city has no little competition. Before opening LaRina three years ago, she worked in the most prestigious Italian kitchens and she was even a Top Chef contestant.
The way she tells it, she knew she wanted to become a chef pretty much as soon as she learned to read. As for many Italians, her romance with food started in the family. “It all started with my grandmother,” she tells me, with a warm and friendly voice, over the phone. “When I was a child, I was a bit of a troublemaker. They used to call me il terremoto (earthquake in Italian). My grandmother had two ways of making me pipe down: either she gave me wine with water, as a good Venetian grandmother, or she let me cook with her.”
When her grandmother passed away, Barban realized what a fundamental unifying role her cooking for all her family had. “Meals had always been those moments when we were all together, when we shared the moment and forgot all about quarrels,” she recounts. “When my grandmother passed away, I asked myself, ‘Who’s going to keep us all together now?, and I decided to be that person.” Growing up, Barban realized she wanted to be a unifying force not only for her family, but for all people.
After moving to New York, Barban decided her mission would be to make Americans really understand what Italian food is, and what it should taste like. “Let’s say I carry the Italian flag with me,” she says. “I’m doing my best to make people understand Italian cooking, and understand that Italian and Italian American food are two different things.” If she goes to an Italian restaurant and finds out they put butter in the cacio e pepe pasta (here the original, butter-less recipe), she says, she is enraged. Her mission is to faithfully preserve Italian cooking, as it’s done back home in Italy.
Her passionate values reflect in her restaurant. “I do things the traditional way,” she explains. “The lasagna we have on the menu is cooked according to the recipe of one of my business partners’ grandmother.” It’s been on the menu since day one, and she still thinks it’s one of the best things one could order.
The second best thing, also on the menu since day one, is traditional, but with a twist: spaghetti aglio e olio – spaghetti with garlic and olive oil – the most traditional Italian recipe ever, except the spaghetti are smoked.
When Italian people come to the restaurant – and they do – they peer at the menu suspiciously. “Smoked spaghetti?” they ask. Barban knows Italian are wary about their food. “But I say, ‘You try it and you will see.”
We couldn’t agree more. Follow her advice. Try LaRina out, and you will see.
