Scarpetta

• Cuisine(s): Italian
  Hours: Sun 11am-2:30pm, Daily 6pm-12am
• Attire: Casual dressy
  Features: Kid Friendly, Patio/Sidewalk Dining, Private Party, Water View, Wheelchair Accessible
• Reservations: Accepted

Description

Scarpetta restaurant docked at the Fontainebleau fresh from the flagship's successful launch in New York. Chef Scott Conant's "Italian soul food" is basic and the technique classical. Most ingredients are traditional, and the resultant flavors meld rustic and earthy with streamlined and refined. The simplest of the succinct menu's offerings is the exquisitely soft, raw hamachi yellowtail misted with ginger-infused olive oil and speckled with coarse crystals of Hawaiian baked-clay sea salt. Conant's signature spaghetti pomodoro is hardly more complex: thick strands of the pasta twirled into a nest with a slow-cooked sauce made from nothing but fresh tomatoes, basil, a pinch of Parmesan, butter, and olive oil. Chewy, rough-hewn rectangles of agnolotti dal plin (all pastas are prepared on premises) are even better - the Piedmontese pouches puffed with a smooth purée of veal, pork, and melted Fontina cheese, and bathed in butter, truffle oil, and Parmesan. The tenderest milk-fed veal chop with hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, as well as black cod coddled with concentrated tomatoes and caramelized fennel are other main course winners. An Italian native might not recognize most of the offerings here, but neither would they be likely to complain.