Cookbook Review: Downtown Italian

Downtown Italian is a cookbook focusing on, yes you guessed it, Italian cuisine. It is written by three restauranteurs from New York City with recipes sections that include antipasti, pastas, main courses, side dishes, Italian-inspired cocktails and desserts. The authors include a sommelier, pasty chef and executive chef. It gives the end-to-end experience of the long Italian meal, complete with wine (and sometimes beer) pairings for each course. The recipes, as a whole, reflect popular trends in restaurants with an emphasis on fresh ingredients and their creative use. The authors claim that the ingredients and techniques used in these recipes have been simplified for accessibility to the home cook. I have mixed thoughts about this cookbook.

There's a lot to like here.

The recipes provide a range of recipes beyond the expected Italian dishes that normally fill a cookbook. Many Italian cookbooks I have come across look like the Olive Garden recipe guide or insist upon only using canned tomatoes and other vegetables to produce dense and heavy sauces that mask the canning acidity with an excess of parsley. These are the kind of dishes you would expect to find in an Italian restaurant advancing contemporary Italian cuisine. (So the shelf life of this book may be more limited than a book focusing on classic dishes.) The book accurately describes itself.


What I like most about the recipes is that most require you to build the dish from scratch rather than using pre-made, store bought ingredients along the way. It's usually quite difficult to find recipes that give you all of the steps to start from scratch. Often I find myself trying to piece together recipes and hoping each recipe not only accurately produces the ingredient but that it produces a variant that plays well with the ultimate dish. So, with that in mind, expect to spend some time putting these dishes together. The recipes will challenge you to cook with ingredients and techniques that may not be familiar to many home chefs (who didn't grow up in an Italian family).

The book is well constructed with clear recipe instructions and navigation. Chapters are well divided and there is little need to flip back and forth between sections to make a dish. The totality of the recipes work well together and you can easily pair the early meal sections together to feed a party, a single main dish for a regular meal, or go all out with a long-winded meal. The volume of recipes is on par with most cookbooks you find on the shelf. Every dish comes with a drink pairing suggestion or two, often with Italian wine or beer.

There are some things I didn't love.

The biggest issue with the cookbook is that many of the ingredients are not accessible to most home cooks, no matter where they live. Many of the recipes rely on delicious but hard to source proteins like octopus or boar. Ok, you can find these proteins in some places but I'm definitely not getting octopus in Dallas. Although boar is native to Texas it is still nearly impossible to find. Many people will have a hard time finding the ingredients required by the recipes and there are not great substitution suggestions with that in mind. I would encourage anybody considering this book to thumb through the recipes and figure out whether you can find the ingredients to make these dishes. Adding greater substitution suggestions would help make the book more flexible. Surely many of these recipes would work with more conventional ingredients even if that will require some seasoning adjustments.

The cocktail section is sort of a strange fit in the book. Several of the recipes are not particularly Italian in nature although they look good. Italian cordials are discussed and recipes are provided but they are mixed in with other recipes like "Texas Mimosa" which seem out of place. I would have liked to have seen more recipes featuring Italy's range of liqueurs or the whole section dropped in favor of more food recipes.

I feel like more recipes could have fit into the book but I'm generally underwhelmed by the current trend of shorter cookbooks with more pictures. That's not really this book's fault and it's not alone in this regard.


Overall I like the book and its theme but I would be hesitant to buy it just because I can't source many of the required ingredients (I received an advance copy to review). Definitely know what you are getting yourself into with the recipes and the ingredients. You aren't making "gravy" and store bought pasta here.