It’s nearly impossible to eat a meal at Babbo, the recently revived Greenwich Village trattoria, without being pummelled by reminders of its past. This can be quite a pleasant experience. For nearly two decades, beginning in 1998, Babbo was one of the most coveted reservations in New York, reshaping how the city—and, arguably, the entire country—understood Italian cuisine and modern restaurant dining writ large. More to the point, it was just a marvellous place to be. It felt essential, intoxicating, urgent, the party-crowded bar area giving way to gracefully spacious dining rooms, the smell of rosemary and wine in the air, the honeyed lighting, the soigné service, the irreverent soundtrack of roaring classic rock. Babbo was the flagship restaurant of Mario Batali, and it became synonymous with his celebrity: charismatic, edgy, expansive, just on the edge of overwhelming. If you know any of this story, you know the rest of it. In late 2017, Batali—always a figure of larger-than-life appetites—was accused, by multiple women, of sexual misconduct. Over the next few years, he stepped back from his restaurants and retreated from public life. Most of his roughly two dozen restaurants eventually closed; Babbo remained open but failed to shake off its association with Batali’s tarnished name. The place became radioactive—you only ate there if you didn’t know about what the chef had been accused of, or if you wanted to announce that you didn’t care.

Early this year, when news emerged that the mega-restaurateur Stephen Starr was taking over Babbo and installing Mark Ladner, a former Batali deputy, at the helm, food-world group chats lit up with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation. If the goal was to preserve Babbo qua Babbo, you really couldn’t make a better pick than Ladner. He’d been a sous chef at the restaurant when it first opened, before going on to run Lupa, Batali’s ode to Roman cuisine. In 2005, he became the opening executive chef of Del Posto, a grand, enormous, Old World-inspired dining room in West Chelsea that was generally considered to be Batali’s naked play for a four-star review from the Times—which Del Posto received, eventually, in 2010. Nearly a year before Batali’s public downfall, Ladner left to launch a fast-casual restaurant, Pasta Flyer, which never managed to catch on, and he has spent the years since mostly as a gastronomic gun for hire. But perhaps no one, besides Batali himself, has a better handle on the Batali way of doing things in the kitchen. The decision to bring him back made a very particular sort of statement—the new Babbo would be a feat of selective nostalgia, an homage to a prelapsarian idyll.

The restaurant’s dining rooms, gently renovated, still evoke the soigné mood of the original.

Can you have Batali minus Batali? The space certainly hasn’t changed much. A renovation, under Starr’s direction, has brightened the downstairs dining room and darkened the upstairs, but for the most part the place feels just as it always did. Tight tables are still squeezed in beneath the windows of the tiled entryway. A grand staircase still anchors the downstairs dining room, with a baroquely laid service table standing at the base, around which captains and runners hover. The amber lighting still kisses diners on the cheeks and shoulders. Most uncannily, a solid portion of Ladner’s menu is Babbo Revival, a greatest-hits collection of dishes that once made the restaurant famous, or maybe vice versa. You can order an appetizer of warm lamb’s tongue; wallopy pastas such as beef-cheek ravioli with liver and truffles, or goat-cheese tortelloni dusted with fennel pollen, a favorite Batali seasoning; and fried veal sweetbreads, crisp and airy. Other now-gone pillars of the extended empire are evoked, too: A fluke crudo with puckery “tomato raisins” and sea beans summons the best of Esca, the erstwhile seafood-focussed spot in midtown; an escarole salad with walnuts and red onions was a famous Lupa starter. Ladner even brings back his own signature dish, a hundred-layer lasagna that he first developed at Del Posto. There, it was a precise rectangular cross-section. At the new Babbo, the portion is a slab as big as a ream of printer paper, priced at a hundred dollars and meant to serve four. Ladner himself might emerge from the kitchen, towering in his chef’s toque, to present it tableside, then whisk it away to a service table in the center of the dining room to portion it out, wielding an enormous mezzaluna with the summoned focus of a virtuoso at his instrument.

A trio of fish crudo evokes Esca, Batali’s late seafood-focussed restaurant in midtown.

During three recent meals at Babbo, I experienced intermittent moments of culinary magic. Garlicky, unctuously tender lamb chops scottadito, served with a tangle of chard in an ebullient puttanesca sauce; a scoop of fregola, dressed in a shrimp-infused tomato broth with vinegary wisps of artichoke, topped with enormous, tender prawns; a linguine vongole so briny and winey and rich that I wanted to drink the buttery dregs from the bowl. But too many Babbo-ish beats that ought to have been heavenly instead left me right here on earth. Calamarata, a ring-shaped pasta, wittily paired with calamari rings and served “Sicilian lifeguard style,” bizarrely lacked zing, despite the olives and capers in the sauce. A veal chop dressed with wild-mushroom marsala sauce enriched with foie gras, in contrast, tasted of little besides fat and salt. The second-most famous pasta of Batali’s heyday, “love letters” filled with merguez sausage and dressed in a tomatoey sauce with peas and mint—an inspired merging of European and North African flavors—was, in its Ladnerian update, anticlimactically lacking in spice or brightness. (By my second visit, it had disappeared from the menu.) I was disappointed by the enormous lasagna, too: the miraculous lightness of its construction was eclipsed by a charred cheese crust, inspired by Detroit-style pizza, which was so leathery that the dish arrived with steak knives. (I’ll also pedantically quibble with the lasagna’s alleged centuplicity: by my calculation, Ladner gets to a hundred by counting the sauce layers as well as the pasta sheets, which strikes me as cheating.)

From the dessert menu, a blueberry-and-blue-cheese budino.

On my first visit to the original Babbo—God, it must have been twenty years ago—I remember being stunned at my first bite of the beef-cheek ravioli. (“Of all the pasta dishes—indeed, of all the dishes—on the menu, this is probably the one most associated with Babbo,” Batali writes of the recipe, in “The Babbo Cookbook,” from 2002.) I froze. I think I stopped chewing. I was astounded that a mouthful of food could be so forceful and so silken at once. I wish I could say that I felt the same way about the version at the new Babbo. Some of the disappointment, I’m sure, had to do with the difficulty of measuring up to memory, but it was also right there on the plate. On one evening, the filling was oddly crumbly and dry, and on another the ravioli’s thick chicken-liver ragú—a striking departure from the light, buttery emulsion that dressed Batali’s original—was broken and greasy. These miscalibrations made no sense: Ladner is a known genius of noodles; even Pasta Flyer, his doomed fast-casual attempt, produced superlative food. At Babbo, he’s putting his own spin on Batali’s star dishes, as any chef of his calibre ought to, but these changes only work if they make the dishes better.

Mark Ladner plates a dish.

Why keep Babbo going at all? This, to me, is the big question. Babbo was wonderful, epoch-defining—but it was. Its revival, like any revival, is a sort of exhumation, and inevitably also a bit of an autopsy. We know what went wrong; the investigation into Batali’s misdeeds helped win the Times a Pulitzer, for goodness’ sake. The big, brash, magnificent era that came before all of that, when the island of Manhattan was studded with Batali joints, each one exploring a different facet of the cuisine of Italy, came to an abrupt and ignominious end. Starr’s Babbo might be most generously understood as an attempt to surgically separate art from artist: it asks us to revel in the heyday of Babbo, its warmth and vivacity, while studiously avoiding any acknowledgment of the man who created and embodied it. This isn’t an outlandish request—we’re great at selective sanitization; not too many Great Gatsby-themed parties feature dead bodies in the swimming pool—but in this case it’s a futile one. Batali’s presence is so strong at Babbo, even now, that his orange Crocs might as well be mounted over the door.

What this new Babbo needs to be, to own its history and to transcend it, to justify its obsession with itself, is spectacular. This is all the more true when it comes to drawing in (and bringing back!) new diners, the ones who can avoid all the uncomfortable questions surrounding the restaurant’s revival simply by not knowing its backstory at all. Maybe you weren’t following the news; I don’t know, maybe you had barely been born. You might be aware, broadly, that Babbo is important, that its reopening is noteworthy, that it’s buzzy as hell right now. And then you come in for dinner, have a nice meal and a glass of a significant Barolo or a frothy tomato Martini, and you leave thinking that Babbo is just an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, rather on the expensive side, with a lovely atmosphere, terrific service, and food that’s hit or miss. It might not stand out, especially, in the landscape of dining rooms serving terrific pastas and osso bucos and zabagliones in New York City right now. Sure, it used to be all red sauce and Sinatra in this town, but then some force took hold a couple decades ago that shook everything up, made all the richness and personality of Italian cuisine come exhilaratingly into focus. Thanks to Batali, in all sorts of ways, things will never be the same. ♦

The beef-cheek ravioli, a classic Babbo dish that Ladner has updated.