Osteria Mozza
641N. Highland Avenue, Los Angeles

We visited Osteria Mozza Saturday @ 10:45 pm
Dish we will try to cook – Tagliatelle Verde $19

Restaurant Visit
Osteria Mozza definitely stands out in the eclectic Los Angeles restaurant scene. Nancy Silverton (behind the famed La Brea Bakery and Campanille with her ex-husband Mark Peel), Mario Batali and Joseph Bastianich opened Osteria Mozza in June of 2006, and securing a reservation hasn’t become any easier since then. For once, we tried to plan ahead and called to make a reservation back on Wednesday (for Saturday or Sunday) and were told the earliest opening they had was 10:45pm on Saturday and of course they were completely booked on Sunday, being Father’s Day and all. So we made the reservation and pined the day away on Saturday til we could savor their delicious pasta dishes.

This was our second visit to Osteria Mozza, having last visited the place back in the fall of 2007 (to be sappy for a moment – this is where Romeo met Amanda’s mom for the first time.) We’re not sure why we waited so long for a repeat visit as the Italian food is simply unbeatable. If you’d like to try a Mario Batali restaurant without quite so high a price tag, Pizzeria Mozza, located directly next door, offers delicious pizzas, salads and daily specials at about half the price. You can also visit Osteria Mozza Sunday-Thursday and for $35 enjoy a three-course meal from their amaro bar menu. While Osteria Mozza is only open for dinner, Pizzeria Mozza is open for both lunch and dinner. Reservations are highly recommended for both restaurants.

Valet parking is available, located on Highland closer to the front door of Pizzeria Mozza. However, street parking can usually be found along either Melrose or Highland especially if you are dining later at night since there is not much at this particular cross-street area of town. Upon entering Osteria Mozza, the hustle and bustle of the street is calmed by deep chocolate and slate blue walls, a high, deep chocolate ceiling and small touches like a large, wrought iron electric chandelier hanging above the entry way. The restaurant is decently sized but not large, hint why snagging a table can sometimes be a little difficult. In the middle of the place is the mozzarella bar where you can sit and watch the chefs slice fresh meats and prepare dishes from their mozzarella bar menu. A large bar is located along one of the back walls and looks fairly well stocked.

Our table was towards the front of the main area, but truthfully, there doesn’t seem to be a bad table in the place. Upon being seated, be sure to take an ever-so-subtle look around at your fellow dinners as you can typically spot someone famous dining on any given night. Debi Mazar, from Entourage, was sitting at the table next to ours.

Since we felt it was a little late in the evening for a heavy meal, we decided to take it light (by our standards) and ordered an appetizer and a few pasta dishes from the Primi menu. We chose the burricotta (with braised artichokes, pine nuts, currants and mint pesto) $15, from their Mozzarella Bar menu with the tagliatelle verde (with lamb ragu’, olive taggiasche and mint) $19 and martagliati (with wild boar ragu’) $18 for our main courses. Our friend Shahram dined with us as well and ordered the spaghetti alla carbonara $13.

Three varieties of bread were offered to each of us, (white, wheat and multi-grain) as we waited for our dishes. Surprisingly enough, we weren’t offered any butter or olive oil to go along with our bread. We’re not sure whether this is standard practice or if they simply forgot to serve it to us. Even alone, however, the bread was exactly what you’d expect from the originator of La Brea Bakery – fresh, soft, full of flavor. We were also treated with three bite-size ricotta crustinis on the house.

When a restaurant has a mozzarella bar section on the menu, you know all the plates will be exceptional. Our burricotta certainly was. Even to the eye, the food looked artful with the artichokes leaves displayed like flowers. The dish consisted of two toast topped with ricotta, leaves of artichoke, olive puree and mint pesto sauce. Pine nuts and currants were sprinkled on top. This served as a delicious appetizer as the dish is very creamy in what you want from an Italian restaurant but not over-the-top rich.

Next came our pasta plates. The waiter had cautioned us as we ordered that the items were quite small, but we found them to be rather filling. The spaghetti is served with a raw egg on top and the yolk is broken and then tossed with the pasta, table side. Having to wait the 30 seconds for the waiter to finalize the dish only made our taste buds water even more. Then the tagliatelle verde and martagliati were topped with parmagiano reggiano and we were finally able to dig in. Well, after we took several pictures of each plate of course.

At this point, conversation ceased for a bit as we become fully engulfed with our fresh pasta. When you are use to buying pre-made pasta and boiling it at home, you forget truly how satisfying fresh made noodles are. They are so tender and delicate that they really do seem to melt in your mouth. Which only servers to enhance the flavors of the ragu’ even more.

The spaghetti alla carbonara should not be missed. While ours was ordered without the pork, the dish was so full of flavor its hard to envision the added ingredient making it any better. The egg yolk adds a wonderful creamy texture and flavor to the dish while the parmagiano delivers a punch of saltiness. Fresh basil leaves and garlic round out the dish. We also detected a subtle spiciness on our tongues as you chew the round, al dente noodles that we didn’t notice upon first taking a bite.

Both the tagliatelle and martagliati offer a different type of pasta dish from the spaghetti. The ragu’ isn’t so much a sauce as you think of it in the traditional way you grew up with spaghetti noodles drowning in tomato sauce. In fact, once you’ve finished the noodles, there is hardly any trace of the dish left on your plate.

Wild boar is the dominate flavor in the martagliati. If you are sensitive to the taste of wild game, you may not enjoy this particular dish. However, if you like the taste of meat, the boar ragu’ is superb. The noodles are paper thin, flat and about two inches wide. While the ragu’ is tomato based, you don’t get a lot of tomato flavor. Besides the fresh noodles and boar tastes, you notice fresh olive oil and chives.

For our readers who follow us regularly, or even if you’ve only read our last restaurant review for Noir Food and Wine, you wont be surprised that we also ordered the tagliatelle verde with lamb ragu’. Since Amanda loves lamb, and we have never cooked it at home, we decided this would be the perfect dish to choose to recreate. As the name implies, the noodles are fresh spinach noodles about an inch wide and again, paper-thin. You almost don’t even taste the noodles as you do the store bought flour noodles. Like in the other dishes, they simply melt in your mouth. The lamb and mint are the bold flavors in this dish. The ragu’ is tomato based, the same as what is used in the martagliati, but the use of lamb lends it completely different tones of flavor. Chunks of lamb carry the ragu’ with a tenderness you don’t expect from lamb. Small black olives are sprinkled on top, to round out the plate.

And while initially we were going to end our dinner there, we of course ended up ordering a dessert as well. The rosemary olive oil cakes (olive oil gelato and rosemary brittle) $11, were such an unexpected item to see on a dessert menu that we simply could not resist. The cakes are small, domed cakes sprinkled with powdered sugar. And surprisingly, you really do taste olive oil as you eat them. The ice cream is what most threw us for a loop, as it really tasted like rosemary and had a powerful saltiness to it.

As we left the restaurant, happy and full of pasta, we knew we had our work cut out for us. Having never prepared lamb or made home-made noodles before, this would certainly be a challenge, but one we were looking forward to learning from.

Shopping
(prices reflect the cost of the package, not the portion we used.) The rest of the ingredients we already had in the kitchen.

Whole Foods
Paremigiano Reggiano $5.89
Lamb Shank, 3 $15.39
Roma Tomatoes, 2.26lb $4.50
White Onion $2.97
Spinach, fresh $9.98
Mint $1.99
Organic Large Eggs, 6 $2.69

Bay Cities Italian Deli
Pitted Taggiasch Olives $7.56

Recipe
Below is our take on tagliatelle verde with lamb ragu. While we have no idea exactly how they prepare theirs, we looked around online for traditional recipes, read about how to make pasta from scratch and then combined that knowledge with the flavors we tasted in the original dish and went from there.

Makes 6 servings.

Tagliatelle Verde-

4 eggs
3 cups all purpose flour
1 cup spinach, washed
1/2 tsp olive oil
pinch of salt

Bring pot of water to a boil. Add spinach and blanch for 30 seconds. Remove spinach with a slotted spoon, drain and transfer to bowl of ice water to stop cooking. Remove leaves and squeeze out all excess liquid. Set aside. Make a mound of flour on a wood cutting board and make a well in the middle of the flour. Inside the well add the eggs and olive oil. Then finely chop the spinach and add on top of eggs. With a fork, beat egg, oil and spinach mixture, incorporating some of the flour. To retain the shape of the mound and well, push the flour up from the base. Once about half of the dough is incorporated to the mixture, start kneading the dough with your hands until mixture becomes consistent. Lightly dust board with flour again and continue kneading until mixture becomes lightly sticky, about 5 minutes. Wrap dough in plastic wrap and allow to rest for 30 minutes at room temperature. Roll pasta until very fine and cut into 2 inch strips. Cook pasta in salted boiling water for 2 minutes, or until al dente. Drain pasta and reserve some pasta water.

Lamb Ragu-

2 lamb shanks, about 2 1/4 pounds
2 pounds plum tomatoes, peeled and chopped
2 medium onions, diced
2 cloves garlic, sliced
2 branches fresh rosemary
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
Salt, black and red pepper flakes to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. On a stove, heat a 4-quart ovenproof casserole over medium high heat. Add oil and heat until just at smoking point. Add lamb shanks, brown on all sides and remove. Lower heat to medium. Add onions, garlic and rosemary and sauté until soft about 5 minutes. Add white wine. Scrape pan, return lamb to casserole, season with salt and pepper, then cover and bake 90 minutes, turning lamb once. Remove lamb from casserole. Cut meat from bones, trimming off fat and gristle. Finely dice meat and add to casserole. Add tomatoes and red pepper. Simmer on top of stove one hour.

Olive Taggiashe and mint-
Chop mint and mix with olives.

Plating
Toss noodles with the ragu’ being careful to not over sauce the dish. You want enough ragu’ to cover the noodles, but not drown them in it. Then place a generous serving in the middle of a large plate. Garnish with fresh mint and olives and grated parmagiano.

Rating- We give our dish 1 out of 5 stars.
This may be the lowest we’ve given ourselves to date. Not because the final dish was ineatible or horrible in any way, but simply because it was no where near as refined as the original Osteria Mozza dish.

First, we made the noodles twice in order to prefect the recipe we posted above. The first time through, we followed the general recipes we read but found that the noodles simple weren’t green enough, and also learned that they need to be rolled much thinner in order to produce a noodle that was extremely delicate and didn’t taste like flour. So, the second time we wrote the recipe we added a lot more spinach to the kneading and found this was much more successful. Still not on par with their noodle that was consistently green through, but much closer. We are wondering if they perhaps used spinach powder in their dough? Or maybe liquefied the fresh spinach before adding the ingredient to the flour.

The trick to creating a delicate noodle is really just to roll it as thin as your possible can. And then slice it to the desired thickness. It definitely is a labor intensive process which may or may not be worth it to you in the end. Another pointer we can give you is when you are cutting your noodles, don’t stack them on top of themselves as you go through all the dough, before cooking. We had an issue with the cut noodles sticking together and becoming nearly impossible to pull apart before adding them to the water.

We were more successful with the ragu’, the lamb in particular. This was our first time cooking lamb and were surprised at just how easy it is. We will definitely be preparing lamb more in the future, either as a ragu’ or simply as the protein on our plates. Our ragu’ was a bit thinner than Osteria’s, leading us to think they may blend the tomatoes before cooking. The taste was similar to theirs, but again, just not as overly refined.

Overall, we are happy to learn how to prepare and cook lamb and look forward to experimenting with this meat more in the future. Store bought noodles are no match for the flavor and texture of home made noodles, but it is something what we would make more as a treat and not for an every day meal, simply for the time commentment.
How would you rate our recipe? We look forward to hearing feedback from you guys on how you think we might have been more successful. Anyone have any tips for making spinach noodles at home? We would love to perfect this skill! Feel free to email us if you have any questions on the baking instructions and don’t forget to vote for next week’s restaurant!

Tags: Lamb, Osteria Mozza, Ragu, Tagliatelle

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 11:03 am and is filed under Meat, Pasta. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.