RESTAURANT STORIES
At Il Mulino, $10.95 for lunch is a real bargain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
The bill came on an engraved silver tray and had lines to fill in both the waiter’s tip and the captain’s tip. Such a robber baron service structure might make sense when you’re dining on a $48 osso buco finished tableside by a tuxedoed waiter. It comes off as more than a little silly when you’ve just helped yourself to a $10.95 buffet served in the lobby of a downtown office tower.
Not that I’m complaining…
Becky Stein/AJC special
At dinner, Dover Sole fillet is served table-side at il Mulino. That’ll cost you a good deal more than the bargain lunch.
The workaday lunch buffet at Il Mulino New York downtown might seem at first like another desperate move made by a restaurant struggling with the recession and the seemingly game-changing shift in America’s dining habits. Another last-ditch effort to get butts into seats.
Maybe so. But, strangely, this buffet casts a light onto the soul of Il Mulino.
First, a little history. The original Il Mulino is an old-school institution in New York’s Greenwich Village, opened by Italian brothers Fernando and Gino Masci in 1981. It is the kind of place that gets top marks in the Zagat Survey year after year, but has fallen off the gastronomic radar. The menu conveys a continental spirit with its scrolling font, classic recipes and eye-popping prices. The service style is formal yet indulgent, pampering even, as the captains describe the food in mouthwatering detail and the waiters ply customers with gratis antipasti. Chunks of parmigiano reggiano carved right from the wheel, fried zucchini slices, salumi and other taste appear before you’ve decided on your entrée. Captains toss your salads and sauce your meats on gueridons (service carts) that they roll to the side of the table. More tastes, including glasses of house-infused grappa, end the meal. It’s good dining schtick.
After resisting for years the temptation to franchise, the Masci brothers made the choice to open their first branch in 2004 in Dallas, partnering with local chain restaurant impresario Phil Romano (yes, of Romano’s Macaroni Grill). This restaurant was a gilded palace — the grandest restaurant to open that year in a city that loves excess. The opening was a sensation, but it didn’t last long. The crowd, as it will, moved on to the next big thing, and the restaurant closed.
The Mascis found that Il Mulino franchises would have much better success if they were presented in the context of business dining. So branches started popping up in Miami, Chicago, Tokyo, Washington, D.C. Atlanta’s opened last year. Instead of flaunting their jewels and couture, guests came to show off their expense accounts, ordering serious bottles of wine and passing $1,000 tabs to their company accountants.
Il Mulino had become one of those chains that fed off the largesse of the corporate world. It was an Italian dinner house that figured out a way to play in the same league with prime steakhouses.
But it didn’t start out that way. In fact, when Il Mulino opened in 1981, America was mired in another recession that would last more than a year. I would conjecture that the first guests who walked into this restaurant found the prices a little high at first glance but when they factored in all the complementary tastes and the ever-attentive service, it ended up feeling like a bargain. (More recently we’ve felt a little of this “expensive bargain” phenomenon at Brazilian steakhouses.)
Yet “bargain” is certainly not the word people use when they look at the menu for Atlanta’s Il Mulino today. Pastas cost more than $20; shrimp is $35. Locals didn’t want to pay these prices, and the expense-account dining was drying up.
So, last month, the restaurant started serving the lunch buffet on the atrium patio outside the dining room proper.
The price — $10.95 plus tax, tip and any beverages or desserts — may be more than most of us want to pay for a workday lunch. But, man, is it a bargain. A typical day’s offering includes three or four salads, three or four entrees, a soup and a carving station. But it isn’t just fodder. It’s good Italian food.
Some of the highlights when I visited: vitello tonnato (the classic dish of cold sliced veal in a tuna sauce), a rosy leg of lamb stuffed with garlic on the carving station, a cleanly pitched pasta fagioli soup, a salad with cherry tomatoes and soft mozzarella that oozes milky juices when you bite into it. You feel taken care of when you eat this food.
After my meal, I asked general manager Carlo Andolini about the buffet. It is, he claims, profitable and popular.
“Some of the things we came in with from New York just didn’t work in the South,” Andolini admitted. “We just want to be part of the community here. We’re in it for the long haul.”
Il Mulino New York, 191 Peachtree Street, 404-524-5777.
