12 hours ago
Leonetta Adds Mediterranean Cuisine To Manhattan's 'Curry Hill'
Mezes and flatbreads are an array of first courses at Leonetta.
Among food lovers, Manhattan's Murray Hill neighborhood, on the east side in the thirties, is affectionately known as Curry Hill owing to its large number of Indian restaurants. Leonetta, opened last autumn, adds a welcome departure with a menu from the Eastern Mediterranean.
It's a very handsome restaurant––what the British would call smart posh––with a glittering bar and roomy central booths, bentwood chairs, wood floors, fringed jellyfish hanging lamps, and good lighting throughout, with plenty of greenery and a window wall on the street, with an adjacent smaller room and a more intimate downstairs space called Leo's Famous.
Handsome and well-lighted, Leonetta draws a largely female crowd.
For whatever reason, the clientele is, each night, composed of seventy percent women, including at the long bar, and they dress up and keep the atmosphere vivacious. Sadly they must shout to be heard over thundering music speakers with thudding bass lines layered over indefinable canned music. For the millionth time, nobody goes to a good restaurant to hear loud music, and it baffles me that restaurateurs think it provides an appealing 'vibe.'
Chef Cotton's ;are menu is suffused with spices from all over the Mediterranean.
Chef Ed Cotton, a Massachusetts native, worked in Boston with Todd English and followed with stints with Daniel Boulud, Laurent Tourondel and David Burke, whose influence for fired, gutsy textures and flavors is clear at Leonetta.
The menu ranges from mezes to pizzas and pitas, salads, seafood and meats, all from the food cultures of the Mediterranean, beginning with a lush baba ghanoush of nicely charred eggplant with an intense confit of tomato and pickled onions. Black garlic hummus picks up flavors from toasted spices and tender marinated chickpeas. A delicious choice to be shared is the chopped tuna puttanesca with entwined flavors and textures of tomato, olive, capers anchovy, and sesame grissini.
Shawarma is a hefty pork shank with crisp skin to be stuffed into pita bread.
The pita breads at Leonetta are terrific––puffy, warm and yeasty, with a toasty sear on the outside, which can be had with Greek spanakopita filling, while the rosemary focaccia bread comes with olives, whipped ricotta and za'atar.
There are five pastas that are lusty indeed, like the frilly black truffle mafaldine with wild mushrooms, mascarpone and Parmigiano. Even better is the rick shrimp Israeli cous cous scented with saffron and studded with zucchini, tomato and lemon.
The most interesting of the seafood dishes is the swordfish steak with chermoula,gingered cauliflower pilaf, eggplant yogurt and charred lemon. The lamb mixed grill, at $55, is a bargain, since you get a generous platter of loin, Merguez sausage tomato and spinach orzo, kalamata olives and chickpeas.
A fudge chocolate dessert with ice cream.
The not-to-be-missed dish, to share, is the pork shawarma, consisting of a massive bone-in shank cooked till tender so that the bone slides right out. With its crispy skin and well-seasoned meat, it is meant to be stuffed into those fine pitas, with tangy turmeric pickles and dressed with a white and red sauce.
Among the side dishes, the aromatic basmati rice involves sweet Medjool dates and black mission figs, and you should definitely order a plate of the fat, za'atar-laced steak fries with bits of feta and hot harissa ketchup.
For dessert there's a commendable tiramisù; rich chocolate pudding with an orange-saffron marmalade and Chantilly cream; and a pleasing semolina cake flavored with olive oil and served with fior di latte gelato and a pine nut-rosemary crumble.
There is, of course, an array of signature cocktails and a pretty good wine list with reasonably priced wines well under $100 and several wines by the glass.
Our waiter, whose name was Joel, was exceptionally affable and helpful throughout service, and as the room started to empty around nine o'clock, that throbbing vibe did too. I do wish they'd change the outmoded policy of only seating a party when all members have arrived, which, depending on New York traffic, could be a long wait at the hostess station or the bar.
Leonetta seems wholly fitting within its neighborhood, for its food shares the same focus on spices and seasonings, charring and cooling yogurt as do its Indian neighbors. It's already caught on with the young professionals and the many nearby hospital staffers from NYU Langone, Lenox Hill and Mount Sinai who can come for a meal of small bites, pizzas, pastas or a full-scale dinner in a splendid surroundings.
LEONETTA
181 Lexington Avenue
646-448-4288
Open for lunch Mon.-Fri.; brunch Sat. & Sun.; dinner nightly.
