Enjoy Pan-Italian Cuisine at Inoteca Restaurant

Inoteca is a modest restaurant that you may probably miss while walking down the Lower East Side if it wasn’t for the crowd that literally throngs this place. Less of a crowd actually; more like a mob that’s clamoring to get inside and stuff themselves with all the goodies that Inoteca has to offer. The seating is tight, the atmosphere is chaotic, and the wait is long, but well worth it. If you can endure all this, you will be treated to some food that will have you smacking your lips and rubbing your belly in content.

In itself, Inoteca doesn’t impress you with its interiors and thoughtful display of arts and artifacts all throughout the restaurant. The setting is quite simple and characterized by the lack of adornments. Wooden bar, uncovered and polished wooden tabletops, louvered windows that open out to the streets pretty much complete the entire setting of the restaurant. Certainly not much to go by if you simply consider the looks. However, one glance at the menu will tell you that they will be able to conjure up some great Pan-Italian delicacies on the table, and you are going to have a tough time choosing what to begin with.

Inoteca has chosen to forego the appetizer-entrée format of a menu and offers, instead, bite sized, fairly priced food which comes to you in small plates. Experience tells us that these tiny plates quickly stack up on your table as you sample one dish after the other. What do you order next – deep-fried herb-laced “suppli” rice balls, artisanal cheese plates, escarole salad, the antipasti, or spicy chicken tramezzini? They all sound and taste fabulous.

The star of the menu is undoubtedly the Truffle Egg Toast. Its fame has spread far and wide, and people come from far and wide to have it. This toasted Pullman bread with a softly cooked egg in the middle is sprinkled with fontina cheese, with a dash of the truffle oil for that unforgettable taste. It is served along with sliced and roasted asparagus. If there is a Truffle Egg Toast heaven somewhere, Inoteca gets you pretty close to it!

Finally, worth a mention is the restaurant’s attempt to serve almost authentic porchetta, the sandwich meat that course through the veins of every Italian. It is quite difficult to duplicate the taste of this fennel-stuffed roast sandwich, but they’ve made an effort to do so, coming quite close to success too. Their herb-stuffed porchetta, served with grated cheese, parsley and pickled onions is definitely worth a try. That is if you still have some room in your stomach.

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