http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/dining/restaurant-review-bar-primi-in-the-east-village.html 2014-09-15 23:48:55 Restaurant Review: Bar Primi in the East Village Pasta takes center stage at Bar Primi in the East Village. === Main courses are never as good as the starters, people like to say. I’ve always argued that a good chef won’t let that happen, but I have to admit that it does seem true for a lot of Italian restaurants, at least in New York City. There are exceptions, of course, but as a general rule, it’s all downhill after the spaghetti. One of several reasons to like Mr. Carmellini and his partners (Josh Pickard, Luke Ostrom and Sal Lamboglia) have not exactly discovered life on Mars with this concept. After all, this is the founding principle of cheap Italian restaurants across the country. It’s unusual, though, to see it endorsed by a chef who knows better. Pasta is the whole point of To be fair, Mr. Lamboglia, a longtime Carmellini cook who leads the kitchen at Bar Primi, does offer one main course a night on a weekly rotation. (On Wednesday, it’s the Italian sausage served at Mr. Carmellini’s The menu divides them into “traditional” and “seasonal.” We would be here for hours if I tried to figure out what is seasonal about orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe, a widely known classic from Southern Italy, or which tradition gave us spaghetti with a sauce inspired by clams casino. The important thing to notice is that there are 12 choices in all, and one of them is almost certain to be exactly what you feel like eating. For me, on almost any given night, that would be the linguine with golden bread crumbs and garlic that’s been slapped around in hot olive oil for a minute or so. It may be because the kitchen is using this season’s garlic, but the sliced cloves (four of them, the menu says) tasted as juicy and fresh as corn and, in their oniony way, almost as sweet. For this, I paid $14 and counted myself lucky. Spaghetti pomodoro, also $14, is just as uncomplicated and just as right, with green basil clinging to plum tomatoes cooked to the halfway point between fruit and sauce. Mr. Lamboglia makes those dishes with dried imported noodles. Most of the other pasta is fresh and very good. Its finest use may be the fiore di carciofi, a long, fat spiral filled with creamy artichoke and mascarpone. The sauce (a hot ladleful of fried bacon, garlic, chopped parsley and white wine) works mysteriously well with this mutant, vaguely flower-shaped cannelloni. Bar Primi applies its sauces more liberally than a place in Parma might. Italian verisimilitude is not the goal. Mr. Carmellini and Mr. Lamboglia, who was raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, by a father who cooked for years in restaurants on and off Mulberry Street, have given the menu a red-sauce generosity, even when the sauces aren’t red. Sal’s Antipasti Salad is basically an antipasto sampler of the kind usually seen on a checkered tablecloth — sliced salami and provolone, raw celery and radishes — thrown into a tossed salad with a small blizzard of Parmigiano-Reggiano. It’s impossible to dislike. Shrimp and octopus with boiled potatoes and pickled cherry peppers make a cold seafood salad that few checkered-tablecloth joints could rival. There are even meatballs filled with melted fontina in a rough tomato sauce. You want them to taste handmade, honest and delicious. They do. Grilled broccolini dressed with stewed onions and Aleppo pepper sits on a shiny, smooth brick-colored emulsion. It looks creamy and soothing. It is fierce, fiery and garlic-drenched, a fantastic trick played by the kitchen. The menu has minor dips but no major sinkholes. That disassembled clams casino over spaghetti could do with more clams and less cleverness. The day I had orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe, the divots of dough weren’t as shiny with pork fat and olive oil as they might have been. The idea for Bar Primi came to Mr. Carmellini years ago, before he left Within Mr. Carmellini’s fleet, Bar Primi is more a neighborhood hangout in the spirit of New Yorkers who have watched Mr. Carmellini’s game throughout his career may complain that he now rarely drives to the basket for the spectacular dunks he used to throw down when he was coached by Daniel Boulud. I made that complaint myself about the unimaginative, stubbornly un-French cooking at Lafayette when it opened. But a well-timed layup like Bar Primi can win games, too.