Don't eat dinner at a lunch restaurant

Murano
207 West 36 Street
New York, NY 10018

(212) 695-5220

I love Italian food and I love American food. Murano seems to have confused the best of both.

Murano is quite clearly a business mans fancy lunch, a place were corporate high level gossip can be exchanged while the executives get thoroughly lubricated. Indeed Murano is not open on the weekends.

Italian food has wonderful distinct courses with its antipasti, pasta and secondi all with different tastes and textures. The antipasti is made to be eaten with bread. The pasta’s shape is made to enhance the flavors of the sauce; for example Penne will always be linked with vodka sauce and fettuccini with creamy Alfredo sauce. The secondi’s sometimes meat, sometimes fish are separate and distinct.

In American food, the courses are often combined, and the pasta or starch is served with the meat or fish, but they separate and usually un-sauced and easily identified.

But Murano serves Italian American food probably because American businessmen don’t have the luxury of time their European counterparts have.

Murano’s food has neither the grace of Italian food nor the straight forwardness of American food. Let me give you an example. I ordered fettuccini with salmon in vodka sauce. There was no Alfred available. I expected a filet of salmon with fettuccini on the side. Instead I got a mishmash of both; the filet of salmon was broken up and cooked with the pasta. The salmon was obviously the tasteless farm raised kind, and was made almost indistinct by the orange colored vodka sauce. I also ordered a cold mixed antipasti. Italian food has wonderful Capanata and Gardinera, but instead got olives and mushrooms straight out of a Costco giant jar.

A dinner of a salad, antipasti, two pastas and a shared dessert is approximately $ 100 and hardly worth it.

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