It’s not easy to make an airtight argument that Tony Mantuano is the American prophet for Italian food the way Rick Bayless is for Mexican. For one thing, Mario Batali keeps interrupting. But locally, at least, there’s no single chef more responsible for propagating fresh house-made pasta and real regional Italian food in this city than Mantuano. Yes, the rarefied nature of Levy Restaurants’ flagship Spiaggia keeps a majority of folks away from the high end of it, but plenty of alumni from his kitchens have gone forth across the city spreading the light.
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So it’s a wonder Mantuano didn’t open Bar Toma sooner. It was four years ago that he and his wife, Cathy, published the pan-European cookbook Wine Bar Food, and you’d have thought he’d dive into low-overhead small plates before the market was completely saturated. But here he is, upping the ante right off the Mag Mile, his crew deep-frying sweetbreads, stewing tripe, and potting chicken liver at all hours, right in the heart of the city’s tourist district. There isn’t a shred of pasta to be found anywhere on the menu, though it’s difficult to point to anything else missing among the bar plates, salads, pizzas, espresso, pastries, gelati, and mozzarella bar.
None of this is to say that pitfalls can’t be avoided—acceptable meals can be assembled from the catalog. A small selection (don’t overdo it) from the mozzarella bar doesn’t make a bad introduction to notably inventive snacks such as the rock shrimp polpette, snappy balls of sweet crustacean and milk-soaked bread crumbs bathed in a bright, lemony tomato sauce topped with fried shallot. A generous cross section of crumbly cinnamon-scented seared mortadella has its richness cut by a dose of pickly house-made giardiniera. A jar of radicchio marmalade and goat cheese served with crostini toasted and glistening with olive oil is the sole recipe, incidentally, to make the jump from Wine Bar Food to the menu, even though the book is for sale at the host’s stand. Simple sticks of roasted carrot, goat cheese, and crumbled almonds drizzled with balsamic and oil recall nothing so much as a carrot cake you could re-create on a diet. And say what you will about the pastries, two cigar-shaped filled-to-order cannolli, suitably not oversweetened, provide a modestly satisfying way to end things.
110 E. Pearson 312-266-311bartomachicago.com
