Quinto Quarto

Quinto Quarto
14 Bedford St
NY,NY  10014

Food 4
Ambiance 6
Service 5
Overall 15
Good For...pastas and some well priced wine

I must say that ever since my three trips to Italy, I have become convinced that I will never find pasta or pizza that compares to the magnificent examples I sampled so frequently there. However, as I am a woman on a quest, hope springs eternal and I had vague hope that this restaurant which advertises as an Osteria Roma might be the differance I was looking for. I must admit that the fact that they were advertising as a Roman Osteria might have given me pause. Although the food I had in Rome was good, it was easily dwarfed by the food in so many other more rural places. But I digress.
The restaurant is located in the heart of the West Village, sharing the street with many other well know favorites like Chez Henri and Blue Ribbon. The decor certainly reminded me of many an osteria in Italy. Small ,wood paneling with random signs in Italian. Large open windows with a view to the street. Real candles on the small tables. Its price point was suspiciously low,6 dollar appetizers or desserts, 11 dollars pastas and 19 dollars mains. But when choosing the restaurant, I assumed the price point was an easy way to get customers in the door of this new establishment. The wine list is exclusively Italian, with a well priced selection of a few sections of the country. We opted for a 30 dollar bottle of Valpollicella, which ended up being the highpoint of our meal.
My husband and I started with the fennel orange salad. A small portion of very ripe and juicy oranges and underipe sliced fennel with an overgenerous dousing of olive oil. Certainly good for a 6 dollar entree.
I then ordered the housemade tonnerelli pasta with sausage and porcini mushrooms while my husband opted for the rabbit cooked in tomatoes and anchovy sauce served with potatoes and peas. The pasta came out  in a insipid millky sauce dotted with crumbled sausage meat and a few porcini. Although the noodles, twice the size of spaghetti noodles, were fresh and tasty the sauce was unappetizing to look ,smell and unfortunately even eat. There was no hint of the porcini taste in the sauce and the sausage meat was somehow also falvorless. The rabbit arrived a bony 3 fragments of  2 inch pieces of overcooked and underseasoned meat laying next to a few slivers of old potatoes. Now when I mean old, I mean,  OLD, potatoes roasted several days prior to their being served. The peas were grey in color, so I did not even venture near these.Now while Italian portions are certainly not the mammoth food quanties of Italian American fame, they are more generous than their French counters. The rabbit portions wre truly shocking given the cost. When we informed our waiter,after he asked, about the subpar potatoes and rabbit, he did give us a gratis sampling of a whole sausage and swiss chard side . While a nice gesture, unfortunately both complementary items, were not much better than the original. Determined to have the full Roman Osteria experiance, we ordered a 10 dollar  trifecta of desserts -- ricotta cheesecake, panna cotta and apple chocalate cake with a shot of limoncello. The panna cotta was in indelicate gelatinous mess, the cheesecake a tasty light dessert while the chocalate apple was a intense sweet indulgence. The limoncello was heavy and a bit too sweet with not enough lemon tang for my tastebuds.
Quinto Quarto left me hungering for some true Roman treats. However given the pricepoint, location and ambiance, I would attempt another pasta only forray before completely writing it off. In addition, I appreciated their gesture to try and satisfy us and will take it as proof that some of the subpar food was due to growing pains in this new establishment.
The Quest continues.....