Michael White Returns to Midtown and Power Pasta

Squid-ink pansotti with lobster and calamari. Photo: Hugo Yu

Fifteen years after Marea arrived on Central Park South, the restaurant’s famous pasta — such as the bone marrow-slicked fusilli entangled with octopus — is still there, even if its original chef, Michael White, is not. He has kept busy, establishing BBianco Hospitality with lawyer Bruce Bronster and opening restaurants in the Bahamas and Florida (Dallas and San Juan are on the way too). And later this month, like a ghost haunting his own homes, he’ll be back where he quite literally got his start, in the kitchen where he once ran Alto and impressed diners and Michelin inspectors with rabbit-veal-and-mortadella–stuffed agnolotti. The newly rebuilt space is walking distance from Marea and has been christened Santi.

At Santi, he’ll be treading in his trademark Italian style, traditional with a refined glow-up for the power-lunching crowd and a coterie of regulars who consume caviar and fresh truffles on a regular basis. But he has no interest in repeating himself: “No. 1, on the menu, there is nothing that I did at Marea,” the chef clarifies. “As much as people would want me to do a fusilli with octopus and bone marrow and things like that, I’ve moved on.”

He has never tried to engineer a “hot” dish — not even Marea’s uni-and-lardo toast or the strozzapreti with crab and uni — and he isn’t doing that now: “The customer really dictates what will catch.” Instead, there is a roster of eight-ish pastas, all made at the restaurant with different flours employed for each of the shapes. “Whether they’re durum wheat, wheat flour, double-zero, semolina, or zero, they capture the soul of Italian cooking, and that’s really what we focus on,” White says.

If any of the pastas in the new lineup seems ready for its viral close-up, it’s probably the garganelli. This was the first to go on the menu and among the earliest pastas White learned to make, 30 years ago, when he started as a line cook at San Domenico. At Santi, the ridged, quill-shaped tubes come in three colors — black, green, and yellow — and are tossed with Nantucket scallops plus a cream-tinted broth made from the scallop’s muscles that nestles into the noodles’ grooves. It’s garnished, naturally, with caviar.

Orcchiette with seppia, broccoli-rabe pesto, and Pecorino oro anticotagliatelle, porcini mushrooms, bagna cauda, and black truffle.Hugo Yu.

Orcchiette with seppia, broccoli-rabe pesto, and Pecorino oro anticotagliatelle, porcini mushrooms, bagna cauda, and black truffle.Hugo Yu.

Meanwhile, tagliatelle are intertwined with fresh porcinis and a blitzed-up version of bagna cauda, which, until now, was mostly known as a dip for crudité. White repurposes the Piedmontese “warm bath” of anchovies and garlic as an emulsified sauce for his pasta. Then, since it’s the season and his clients can afford it, he shaves black truffle over the top.

Crab and uni are reunited — here mixed with lemon oil and busiate, the Sicilian pasta named for the knitting needles around which it was once twisted — while pillows of pansotti are stained black with squid ink, stuffed with lobster, and studded with calamari.

White is also looking beyond the Italian coastline. There’s a textbook meat-filled tortellini alla panna luxuriating in a cream sauce, along with autumnal agnolotti stuffed with polenta and cabbage, complemented by Piedmontese-style chicken livers and a sauce of Raschera cheese. Even the ubiquitous gnocchi al pomodoro gets upgraded to luxury status, made over as gnocchi al burro e oro. The “burro” refers to the butter-forward sauce and the “oro” to the pomodoro that lends it an orange hue some might liken to gold, the word for which also happens to be oro in Italian.

And that’s just the pasta. White is also planning a “smattering of crudo” and “a beautiful veal chop,” or a ten-ounce steak with red wine and snails, “kind of like a mari e monte,” he says: surf and turf, Italian style. Taken as a whole, White sees Santi’s menu “as a kind of a culmination of all the different restaurants that I’ve worked at and dishes that have morphed into other dishes and such.” There is, he says, “a place, a reason, and a provenance of all these dishes.” If any one of them has the impact of that fusilli a few blocks over at Central Park South, he’ll celebrate his luck. For now, he seems genuinely grateful to be back in New York City, in a place that feels so comfortable.