Let me begin by saying that I love Lupa! I always find the food delicious and plentiful, and I always love everything about the experience. And so, considering the great food and reasonable prices, I eagerly anticipated the Easter Sunday Dinner that I signed up for, which was a set meal for $60 per person. But it was disappointing food and considerably overpriced for what they served. The starter was a platter of crudites, with olive oil from the Bastianich/Batali estate in Tuscany. It was a few pieces of raw baby carrot, fennel, broccoli, radicchio, and artichoke plus a few chunks of bread, with a bowl of perfectly okay olive oil for dipping, and was a very strange antipasto for a restaurant that specializes in them. The next course had three choices, and I opted for the “Traditional Mortadella filled Pasta in Intense Clear Broth” (there was also a light stew of skate wind with broccolini and ditalini, or a Roman Easter Soup with small lamb meatballs finished with egg yolks). Mine was five tortellini, perfectly nice, served in a little bit of clear broth, perfectly nice as well, at the bottom of a large bowl. For the main course the choices were “slow roasted young lamb with traditional cheese, egg and lemon sauce” or “Pollo Braciole”, large boneless chicken stuffed, rolled and lightly braised”, or a “whole poached sea bass served with Sorrento lemons”. I opted for the roast lamb. The serving was a lamb rib bone, a round sliver of meat from one part of the animal, and a small chunk of meat from another part, all well done, sitting on a perfectly tasty sauce. With the main courses, some fried potatoes (two, actually), artichokes, and peas with prosciutto were served. Nothing was a standout in terms of flavor or texture. (Normally, when peas are offered on the "verdure" section of the antipasti, they are exceptional, but last night they were ordinary at best.) And dessert was a choice of cheese, an ice-cream “tartufino”, or a pineapple “crostada” which turned out to be a small, very good cake that tasted like a corn muffin with pineapple baked on top. As I said at the start, I love Lupa and always have. But this meal hardly had a celebratory feel to it. The servers were all in a downbeat mode, the place was not crowded at all and lacked its usual energy, and the food was alright, but absolutely nothing special (whereas a normal dinner there usually is). And while I am not one to complain about price, from the ‘everything’s relative’ comments on the Per Se thread, I did come away thinking that a few bites of raw vegetables, five tortellini, no matter how good, and a few bites of lamb didn’t really represent $60 worth of dinner, especially at Lupa where you can normally have a genuine feast for that amount. And it was the first time that I ever left a Mario Batali restaurant hungry. I found it a real misstep for Lupa. Was anybody else there on Easter Sunday?
