Tutto Pazzo in Huntington gilds pasta lily
At Tutto Pazzo in Huntington, homemade tortellini are served with Bolognese sauce, July 24, 2014. Credit: Newsday / Erica Marcus
Restaurants run the gamut when it comes to being social-media savvy. Some don’t even have an answering machine, let alone a website. Others produce a constant stream of tweets and Facebook posts. Put Huntington’s Tutto Pazzo in the second category. “Like” the restaurant on Facebook or follow @tuttopazzoluigi on Twitter and you’ll be treated to daily photos and videos of chef-partner Luigi Petrone’s culinary creations.
After a few months of watching videos of Petrone making his own fresh pasta, I recently stopped by for dinner. The sprawling restaurant has two dining rooms and, out back, both a patio and a tented semi-al-fresco area featuring an Italianate fountain. It was a beautiful night; my pals and I took a seat at one of the umbrella'd tables on the patio.
The good news: We had three homemade pastas and they were all very good. The bad news: None of them was sauced to advantage. Garganelli, hand-rolled, quill-shaped cylinders hadn’t actually been sauced; they were just arranged in a starburst pattern on top of a puddle of cheese sauce so that the portion of the pasta not in the sauce got dried out. Tortellini, enviably thin-skinned and delicate, were overwhelmed by an abundance of pea-punctuated Bolognese sauce. I literally had to shake off the sauce to taste them. Fluffy gnocchi were similarly drowned in pomodoro sauce.
A starter of fried zucchini blossoms, a seasonal treat, demonstrated the same lack of restraint: the poor blossoms were buried under slices of capicola and caciocavallo cheese. If the homemade mozzarella had been made that day, it was served to us over-chilled, with no lingering trace of milky tenderness.
Tutto Pazzo Tuscan Lounge is at 84 New York Ave. Huntington, 631-271-2253, tuttopazzo.com.
