Profile

This venue is closed.

Neither neighborly nor small, Pace is an Italian restaurant created in the crowd-pleasing tradition of most new Italian restaurants in town today, which means the room is big and, for better or worse, the menu is, too. If you can't squeeze into one of the 130 seats upstairs, you can repair to the basement (where you'll find the private tasting room). There's a long bar, which is elbow-to-elbow with revelers on most evenings, and a series of café tables overlooking the street. The walls are etched with what appear to be silver murals of old Rome, although if you squint your eyes these runic designs could be haystacks in Iowa, or ice sculptures in old Quebec. These indistinct surroundings are a little unsettling for longtime devotees of Jimmy Bradley and Danny Abrams's (like myself), and so is the menu, which by their normally terse, homey standards is a vast, complex document, bulging with flowery Italianate categories (crudi, panini, riso, etc.) and terms (sarde, cacciucco, maiale). Even more unsettling is the fact that Bradley himself isn't in the kitchen at Pace (pronounced "PAH-che"). That job falls to a competent chef named Joey Campanaro, who used to run the kitchen at the Harrison. — Adam Platt

Attention, grappa fans: Pace offers ten impressive, diverse samples of this fiery liqueur.

Capesante crudo, $9; tonno crudo, $10; maiale panino, $11; vitello tonnato, $12; spinaci, $10; bucatini all'amatriciana, $10; spaghettini, $12; tutto mare risotto, $15; Milanese risotto, $13; pollo Abruzzese, $19; costoletta di vitello, $40; apple spice cake, $8; vanilla-gelato affogato, $8

Related Stories

New York Magazine Reviews

• Adam Platt's Full Review (11/1/04)