Most of you know I am no stranger to the food and wine world and living in New York I have access to a lot of great establishments where I can indulge in these two passions of mine.  I got word a few weeks ago that a new wine bar was going to open in Greenwich Village and it sounded perfect, but I was skeptical based on the man who owns it.

While Roberto Passon is an established restaurateur here in Manhattan, I personally think he did the most cowardly thing he could have done with Aria Wine Bar: he played it safe (and boring) and completely didn’t live up to the concept he had UrbanDaddy and food writer Gael Greene promulgate on the internet, that of having Aria be like a slice of Venetian life.   Passon is respected for his pastas and he was wise to not rely on them here at Aria, but at his original restaurant the pasta was the only thing he got right.

With its communal tables, hanging prosciuttos, and large chalkboards with parts of the bar’s offerings written in a rustic manner, that’s about as Venetian as it got.  In every write-up about Aria before and right after its opening two weeks ago, each person mentioning this new spot obsessed over the fact that Passon was bringing traditional cicchetti, or Venetian-style tapas, to New York.  While I am the product of proud immigrant Italians, I am not Venetian, but I know cicchetti when I see it and cicchetti was not to be found here.

Forgetting the small offering of salumi and some cheeses, there were roughly twenty dishes on the menu and an overwhelming reliance on goat cheese, a/k/a not something you’ll find widely in Venice (if at all).  You don’t have to be card-carrying member of MENSA to deduce that if Venice is built on a series of canals then its residents must eat a lot of seafood, but seafood was virtually non-existent on the menu.  The most traditional cicchette of them all is cod on a piece of crusty bread: not only was no cod to be found, but there was not one instance of fish on bread.   I did have the anchovies with marinated peppers and the anchovies were lackluster and the peppers didn’t have that acidic quality they should have if marinated.  The polenta with sauteed mushrooms was good, but the mushrooms were loaded with butter and even overpowered the shaved parmigiano on top. The polpettini were a nice presentation and had decent flavour, but the pomodoro sauce that dressed them was not as fresh as it should have been.  It seemed like the only thing that worked was the bufala mozzarella with heirloom tomato and basil, but as long as the core ingredients are good no one can screw that up.

Sadly, I was expecting a lot more from the wine list, which was small in comparison to the hype that was built around it.  I had been informed through multiple sources that the list was comprised of wines chosen entirely by women, which in and of itself it a great marketing tool. There were a few whites, two rosés (only one listed on the menu — I had to ask about the other), five reds and a couple of dessert wines. While I commend Mr. Passon for going this route, the wine list was confusing and I honestly didn’t care that next to every wine there was a woman’s name because it’s not like all of these women were present and accounted for so you could choose to commend or scold them for what they selected. While I enjoyed a couple glasses of the Familia Cassone ’08 Malbec, I could have cared less that someone named Florencia felt it belonged there.

All-in-all Aria Wine Bar is not a home run: the atmosphere was fun, but the food failed to deliver on its promise and the wine list was nothing spectacular.  I was really hoping Aria would be one of those unique spots here in New York that actually educated Americans about what true regional Italian cuisine is, but it instead went on stereotypes and placated a society that thinks real Italian food is this homogenized existence where your meatballs actually belong on your pasta.  I think the most fun part of the wine bar was its bathroom where a basket of chalk encouraged patrons to sketch on its walls. If you are reading this Roberto Passon, I left you a note in Italian at the centre of the wall facing the mirror by the sink: leggerlo e magari puoi dirmi dove è il baccalà.