Amo’s Very Italian ‘Tempura’ Mozzarella

Tuna tartare is hiding within. Photo: Courtesy of Amo

When choosing from the hundreds of Italian restaurants in New York, the first question that comes to mind is “red sauce or regional?” It’s the difference between bread and butter and house grissini, tomato sauce on breaded veal versus simmered with al dente paccheri, or chicken francese versus couscous alla Trapanese. Even when the boundaries aren’t abundantly clear, the city’s Italian food is recognizable as a particular type of “New York Italian.” Over in Actual Italy, of course, all of the food is Italian, and so chefs can afford to be less beholden to tradition. When a restaurant like Amo, which opened around the corner from Union Square at the end of July, takes a similar approach, its willingness to break free from Italy’s greatest hits can feel like a welcome surprise.

It’s not just because Amo is run by Italians, which it is, including chef Pasquale Cozzolino, whose other restaurant, Neapolitan pizza parlor Ribalta, sits a block away. At Amo, Cozzolino wanted to focus on seafood, which the menu achieves with an eccentric dedication to the bit spread across the four-page menu. Headings include “Mediterranean sashimi” and “Neapolitan ceviche” mixed in among the swordfish Milanese. Even the focaccia has anchovies.

Amo’s mozzarella in “tempura” is one dish that really does not exist in the context of New York Italian food. For one thing, the term tempura is mostly poetic since this ball of bufala mozzarella is in reality coated with panko crumbs. Then, hidden within a layer of still-cool cheese, is tuna tartare seasoned with lemon zest and sansho pepper, flecked by basil and bits of tomato. To make it, Cozzolino gently heats fresh mozzarella to make it pliable so “you can work on it as a piece of art,” he says. He forms the cheese into a sheet to swaddle the tartare before the mozza, or cinching of the ball. It’s then breaded and gently fried before service, when the cheese ball gets sauced at the table.

Raw tuna plus fried mozzarella is an atypical combination here, probably because it goes against the widespread (and often debunked) adage that cheese and fish don’t belong together in Italian cooking. (See: San Sabino’s shrimp Parm, or Marea’s lobster-and-burrata salad.) “I think that the whole story started because clam spaghetti was the most famous Italian dish in the U.S. and people were asking for Parmesan on it,” Cozzolino muses. “I would never put parmigiano on pasta with clams. Never.” But there’s no hard-and-fast rule back home, where you find mussels with pecorino in Puglia and burrata with anchovies in Campania. “I think mozzarella works perfectly with seafood in Italy,” he says.

Here, the tuna tartare does manage to hold its own next to the milky cheese. As did raw red shrimp tartare on spaghetti. Cozzolino has gone to great lengths to preserve the shrimp’s natural sweetness and luscious texture by sourcing what he calls “cryogenically frozen” seafood, blast-chilled as soon as it is fished, often while still on the boat. The process has historically been more commonly used with fish destined to become sashimi; importing his desired Mediterranean seafood this way has only become an option for Cozzolino in the past few years. “It’s hibernating,” once thawed, “it’s like fresh seafood,” he says. To serve it at Amo, he essentially had to create his own supply chain from the fish distributor in Italy — the shipping container that brings it across the ocean and the truck that gets it to the restaurant each must maintain the -60 °C temperature that preserves the fish rather than merely freezing it.

”The freshness of it is amazing. It’s something that you couldn’t find before in New York City,” boasts Cozzolino, who started working on the transport logistics two years ago before he started building the actual restaurant in January. “In the Mediterranean Sea, the content of salt is higher so the flavor of the seafood is a little different, in a better way.” As far as he knows, he’s the only chef using this type of product, but he compares it to opening Ribalta in 2012, when people thought he was making a mistake by selling Neapolitan pizza in the land of the New York slice. “I was right,” he says. “The people loved it.”