Spiral Project #7: I Coppi

Heading back west on e.9th st, we come full circle since I began to an Italian bistro, I Coppi.

I went on a Tuesday at 7pm and it was pretty quiet – just me and one other table. The wait staff was friendly. The atmosphere was nice – typical better-class Italian restaurant: browns, wood, candles. A full bar was evident and a pizza oven, which was sadly broken.

They apparently have  a garden, closed for the inclement weather.

So this place was kind of hit and miss. First I got the bread basket and some olive oil. The bread was on the tasteless side – they advertised that they don’t bake with salt, the ‘Tuscan Way’ – but the bread was pretty dry and uninspiring in terms of crust and texture. Also, it was cold. Not hot from the oven, already bad, not room temp, but cold. Go figure.

Then I had an appetizer of eggplant with goat cheese in tomato sauce. This was good. I got it to taste the red sauce, which was really good,  I thought – fruity and spicy, far spicier than most Italian places.

My dinner was gnocchi in a Gorgonzola sauce with walnuts and a separate side of garlic and oil spinach. The spinach was nice, but that’s not hard. Now – here comes two recurring complaints I have:

1. Gnocchi that’s squishy is overcooked. Sorry, but it is. If it squishes like a marshmallow, overdone. Considering that it sat in a hot bowl for 20 minutes while I ate it meant it got squishier as it continued to cook. I’ve been to one restaurant so far in NY which prepared the Gnocchi the way I like it. I always order it if it’s on the menu, to see how they do it. Not the most overdone I’ve had, but certainly not good.
2. Don’t label a sauce as ‘Gorgonzola sauce’ if you can barely detect a hint of the delightfully strong and smelly stuff. Please. Anybody who asks for it knows what it is and wants to TASTE it. The cream sauce was bland and only had the barest hint of the cheese. Letdown.

Price-wise I was expecting to pay quite a bit, but I think they gave me the dinner special rates and instead the whole dinner only cost me $24 which was quite reasonable.

Nothing offensive, but nothing stands out. I feel like I’ll come back for brunch or their pizza just to give them another shot, but I’ll have to be in a good mood. And when does that happen?