Review: Graffiato

Dishes like this will make you famous. (image: Washingtonian)

Top Chef, in spite of being a very good reality show, is still a reality show. While the one-in-sixteen shot at winning a hundred large is a nice bonus, the draw for contestants is the instant fame. Top Chef is two things for contestants: the closest you’re going to get to Padma Lakshmi before the restraining order, and a weekly advertisement for your talent.

Talent! That’s the reason I watch the show. With a few exceptions (Project Runway and So You Think You Can Dance among them), the “talent” of most reality competitors is a thick stomach for banal conversation and a fervent desire not to, under any circumstances, make friends here. (They’re still better, however, than the festering human pustules one can find in any reality show involving the words “real”, “MTV”, or “Kardashian”.)

But Thomas Keller didn’t need a reality show. Neither did Jean-Georges or Jose Andres. (Mario Batali became Mario due to the exposure, but don’t forget he was huge – puncraft – in NYC before that). Top Chef is one way to get famous in the culinary industry. The other is to be a really fucking good chef.

If Mike Isabella had opened Graffiato only on the strength of his two deep runs on Top Chef, I probably would have visited it as a curiosity. I did the same for Spike’s burger place (solid, but not the best in town). At least they’re repping DC cuisine, right? But there was another factordrawing me toward’s Graffiato, even beyond K’s frothing desire to go which led her to blow untold workhours planning her meal with the menu online. Good Italian is tough to find in DC, and this was not an untested quantity: I’d always been impressed by Isabella’s Mediterranean takes over multiple visits to Zaytinya.

Tucked onto the storefronts on the slow side of the Verizon Center, Graffiato's warehousey feel was crowded, but charming.

At Zaytinya, Isabella was living out Andres’ vision for upscale Greek and Middle Eastern. At Graffiato, it’s his play on Italian: Italian through the eyes of an Italian-American family, a Jersey family. It’s somewhere between Mulberry Street and the Via Vittorio.

And it blew me away.

You’re constantly hearing writers talk about the experience of food and how it can take you away to other places. I’ve had some great meals and taken some trips, but I don’t think I understood that until I ate at Graffiato. I’ve eaten foie gras; I’ve just never been to France.

But I’ve been to my mother’s kitchen, and the roasted cauliflower and pecorino romano made my mouth water for her pasta y fagiole. I’ve been to Sorrento, and the sweet corn agnolotti, topped with chantrelle mushrooms, was feathery in my mouth, melty beautiful pasta laced with porky goodness. And the Jersey Shore pizza? By rights it should be a silly sideshow, topped with fried calamari and drizzled with red pepper aioli. In practice, it took me back to dinner with my grandparents, out at Laico’s in Jersey City, and for a few misty seconds I was lost in a memory of my family. (And it was damn delicious, at that.) By the time we got to his grandma’s gnocchi, I was blissed out – and yet I kept eating. I’m a sucker for saying it, but you could, actually, kind of taste the love. I will now unsubscribe from Bravo and say three Hail Riperts as penance.

There were no real misses on the menu. The polenta and meatballs were a little underwhelming, and honestly I thought the chicken thighs in pepperoni sauce (one of Isabella’s signature show dishes) weren’t as mindblowing as Tom Colicchio’s on-screen foodgasm made them out to be. Not perfect: but still excellent.

And the other little touches – the prosecco on tap, the off-menu zeppoles for dessert, and especially the olive oil emulsion that comes with the bread, all speak to Isabella’s top-to-bottom attention to detail. (That the bread doesn’t COME with the meal, so everybody can try it, is a rare misstep – especially given how good the sauces are. C’mon Mike!) It was crowded, but the server was on top of his game all night, and when the chef came out to make the rounds, I got to congratulate him on a job well done, which is the kind of thing that turns a great night into an unforgettable one.

Is Graffiato the best meal I’ve had in DC? No. That distinction is Restaurant Eve’s for their own particular brand of hyper-quality. But ask me the better question: is it the favorite meal I’ve had in DC? Well, if I’m to die tomorrow – sorry Eamon. I’m going back to Mike’s place.