Michael R Wilson - The Del Posto Cookbook

In 2004, THE CORNER OF 10th Avenue and 16th Street on the far west side of New York Citys Meatpacking District was very different than it is today. A proverbial no-mans-land, the High Line was still a good five years away, and the surrounding area was much more likely to be a haven for ladies of the night than home to the multimillion-dollar relocation of the Whitney Museum.

But there was me, and Mario and Lidia, chasing another fortuitous real estate deal that was simply too good to pass up. Like all our previous endeavors, it started with a space. In this case, a mind-boggling 28,000-square-foot plot, huge by any citys restaurant standards, especially in Manhattan. Looking at the giant raw space, we envisioned a restaurant defined by its grandeur. Given our ambitions for Del Posto, the plan for the restaurant soon became clearcreate a place to rival the best continental fine-dining restaurants of the world. And it would be Italian, of course.

It wasnt just the location or the sheer size that navigated us into uncharted territory, the concept of luxury Italian fine-dining in New York was something we had to completely invent from scratch. But one thing was certain, it had to be 100 percent authentic Italian cuisine. Taking the simple and down-to-earth cooking of an Italian grandmother and elevating it to the highest and most elegant standards possible was a gamble for a restaurant the size of Del Posto, but we were committed to the idea.

Reinvention was not exactly a foreign concept to Mario and me by the time wed stumbled upon the 10th Avenue space. Even with Babbo and some of our other prior conceptions, we were creating new categories of restaurants that other dining groups would come to populate. At OTTO we put an enoteca (wine bar) inside a pizzeria, something you will never see in Italythey dont even drink wine with pizza, they drink beer. The concept of an urban pizzeria with 500 wines on the list was innovative and experimental, but it was exactly what Italian food and wine lovers in New York City were hungry forthey just didnt know it yet.

Like the restaurant, the wine program at Del Posto has always been audacious, with an elaborate collecting philosophy and a huge cellar. It is arguably one of the most comprehensive Italian wine lists in the country, and can probably lay claim to having one of the biggest Champagne lists in New York City. At one point we even had our own labeling program.

Del Posto was not conceived as a restaurant that would follow trends. It was, and still remains, a restaurant almost defined by its impracticality, and is meant to endure. There hasnt been a flood of high-end Italian restaurant concepts to follow Del Posto, primarily because it is not that easy to do and requires an insane amount of resources. In the fall of 2010, after almost five years of hard work and evolution, the restaurant received a four-star review from the New York Times (the first Italian restaurant to do so in almost 40 years), which was a most welcome validation.

The impact of Del Postos success is clear, but not so much in outright duplication of the restaurant. Our old-world style of cooking and service, with contemporary touches, continues to influence the culture of Italian dining in America. If you want to invent the future, you cant be afraid of reinterpreting the past. Tapping into what people want to experience today, while remaining true to the essence of Italian sensibility, has always been the driving force behind all of our restaurants, but Del Posto is by far our best example of this philosophy.