LA PADRONA ★★★★
38 Trinity Place, Back Bay, Boston.
617-898-0010, www.lapadronaboston.com
Wheelchair accessible via elevator (dining room is upstairs)
Prices Appetizers $12-$28, primi $30-$48, secondi $40-$62 (large-format dishes $126-$216), desserts $14-$18, cocktails $18-$24.
Hours Sun-Wed 5-10 p.m. (lounge until 11), Thu-Sat 5-11 p.m. (lounge until midnight).
Noise level Loud music, loud room. If you require a quieter experience, try booking the club room.
★★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★★ Excellent ★★★ Very good | ★★ Good
★ Fair | (No stars) Poor
There is something about ascending a staircase to reach the dining room of a restaurant. It’s a tone setter, more effective as an appetizer than any bread basket. Each step amplifies anticipation. Even those not inclined to make an entrance are about to make an entrance.
It works best when the restaurant at the top is a luxe room decorated in rich hues of cognac, amber, and oxblood, with a grand bar shaped like a racetrack at the center, tufted nooks with curved banquettes set into the back wall — for eating dinner, and for watching the theater of dinner transpire. This is La Padrona, which opened in May at the Raffles hotel, a project from A Street Hospitality (Porto, Trade). Any description of the place must include the word “swank’’ or it’s a dereliction of duty.
The restaurant marks a return to Italy for chef Jody Adams, long of Rialto in Cambridge. Its menu takes inspiration from her years of travel throughout its regions. If you could not stop watching Stanley Tucci’s “Searching for Italy,’’ this place is for you. Adams and executive chef Amarilys Colon draw from Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Campania, passing dishes through a translation engine of New England produce, seafood, and meat.
Bread has its own section on the menu, which says something about the general aims and viewpoint of La Padrona. Nothing will be a throwaway, and programs like pastry and beverages that sometimes seem a side thought here are top of mind. Not every restaurant can afford decor of walnut, brass, and viola marble, but this mind-set is free.
The ordering of cacio e pepe focaccia is contagious: To see the golden slices with their airy crowns of pecorino is to want them, and suddenly they’re on every table. But do consider a skillet of chickpea spoon bread, a custardy, fluffy, soul-warming take on Italian farinata, crisp on the bottom and topped with charred leeks, celery leaves, and thin-sliced lemon for brightness and complexity.
Among the antipasti, burrata cheese bread eats like a white pizza, pretty with its crimped edges and topping of frilly frisee and thin-sliced purple radishes. But vegetable dishes steal the show in this category. A fritto misto of delicata squash, mushrooms, and fennel with Calabrian chile aioli and lobster bottarga offers some of the seasonal pleasures of tempura, with a crisp coating more reminiscent of fried clams. It overwhelms some of the delicate flavor of the vegetables, but no one minds much. Charred arrowhead cabbage is complemented by anchovy butter, orange, and sage. I was sorry to see sweet peppers tonnato, served over creamy tuna sauce with celery, currants, and smoked almonds, disappear from the menu. It was absolutely delicious, a sleeper dish among more obvious crowd-pleasers.
For instance: tender, sweet Nantucket bay scallops in saffron butter with pancetta, dill, and orange. The golden sauce is poured around the scallops tableside. There is more tableside action at La Padrona than I’ve seen in eons. It adds to the sense of theater, and the audience literally eats it up.
Tagliatelle Emilia-Romagna shines in its simplicity: ethereal pasta, a bath of luscious cream, gratings of Parmigiano and black pepper. Then — tableside — a stripe of aged balsamic is applied down the center. With its pure flavors, high-quality ingredients, focused execution, and fillip of showmanship, it feels like a defining dish. I salute the inventiveness of burnt wheat rigatoni, black like squid ink pasta but smoky like ash, with Barnstable clams, braised tomatoes, seaweed, and crispy little peppers. It’s like a clambake in Basilicata. I’m glad I ordered it. But next time I’m here, it’s the tagliatelle I’ll return to.
Also, to my surprise, the risotto. I’m agnostic about this as a restaurant dish, because 8 times out of 10 the grains are either undercooked or mush. La Padrona’s version is not only perfect in this regard, it is gorgeous from first taste to last, rich with bites of lobster and uni, caramelized fennel and tomato.
I’m a little less excited by La Padrona’s secondi, which comes down in part to personal preference and in part bang for buck: I’d rather splurge on that risotto (a rich $48). But execution is a factor too. I enjoy veal osso buco braised in red wine with polenta and carrots, but it needs salt and the meat is a bit dry. Beef tenderloin is exceedingly tender, but the mushrooms it’s served with taste burnt. There are a few large-format meat dishes — rack of lamb, a 40-ounce bistecca alla fiorentina — for a large party or a special occasion.
I appreciate that these dishes are here, and also that they’re eclipsed by things like dessert and topnotch cocktails. This administration understands my priorities. The Italian margarita contains pear and lavender, two ingredients I’ll always avoid in a cocktail. But a server recommends it with such certainty, I order one, and she is right. It’s a sophisticated, nuanced, balanced drink. There’s a section of the drinks menu devoted to the Negroni, but I don’t make it past the martini list. The Birth of Venus, made with oyster vodka, sherry, and mignonette, served with a crystal dish of pickles, is one of the best cocktails I’ve ever had; if you love oysters, you may feel the same. The wine list is deep, focused on Italy but not exclusively so, with prestige selections available by the glass.
When are cannoli not cannoli? When they’re actually Florentine cookies, lacy and crisp, rolled around citrus-scented ricotta. They are served in a cigar box: a whimsical delight to unbox and to eat. Tiramisu arrives in its mold and is freed tableside, jiggly and boozy as heck. It’s great. Skip the stiff, grainy Earl Grey panna cotta.
There are imperfect moments on the menu, and it’s a mystery why — amid the beautiful plates and glassware, the arresting presentations, the luxurious design — there isn’t really anywhere to put bags. They sometimes wind up lumped on the floor with people’s coats, like we’re at an after-work happy hour at a bar. Also, the place is noisy. Take it or leave it.
But Boston was thirsty: for luxury, for hospitality, for Italian food that hits a sweet spot between familiarity and invention. La Padrona is the restaurant we needed. There are several ways to translate its name — the restaurant seems to go with “the matriarch.’’ That could refer to Adams, who has earned the title (whether she wants it or not) over many years of feeding this city. But it applies as well to the restaurant itself, a grande dame already the day it opened.
Devra First can be reached at devra.first@globe.com. Follow her @devrafirst.
