This is the best restaurant I’ve been to this year. The flavors alone were enough to win my heart, but I also want to call out the service. Knowledgeable staffers seem quite serious about their work and yet give off a vibe that they’re feeling proud and having a good time. It’s noticeable. One night chef and co-owner Hisham Diab, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, served our table bread and bruschetta, and we each got little packets of housemade granola on the way out.
Tiliani is “Italian” in Arabic, so the name makes perfect sense for the cuisine and the location. The food is all halal — no cooking wines — though alcohol will soon be served. It’s one medium-sized room that’s a little loud, with white napkins and tablecloths but no stuffiness.
The meal begins auspiciously with free bread, a rarity (compare restaurants that charge $7). It’s an airy sourdough focaccia, baked in house, and served with a little dish of sharp, unfiltered olive oil from Diab’s grandfather’s farm in Lebanon; both are replenished as needed.
The menu consists of antipasti, pizzas, pasta, and “large plates,” the latter meant for two to share. Antipasti include a kale salad, seafood, bruschetta, stracciatella, and Brussels sprouts. It was the bruschetta that first told me I’d come to the right place: two toasty oblongs with silky marinated eggplant, ricotta, and plenty of pine nuts. A big plate of tiny Brussels sprouts is even better, sharp and tangy, again with pine nuts. I was less impressed with mackerel, which was just a plain slab. Mussels, though, came with some outstanding firm navy beans tossed in beef-bacon fat and a lilting salsa verde.
One of the four pizzas, the patata, has housemade potato chips as a featured ingredient. Diab says his pizzas are “90% Neapolitan style with 10% a twist by a chef from Detroit.” I got the funghi truffle and delighted in its earthiness with a sharp pecorino; though the thick crust was excellent, I do wish the toppings had been spread to the edge. Like the bread, the crust uses 20% whole wheat flour.
I didn’t order a “large plate,” because of the need for everyone in my party to try something different. Also, they range up to $85 for a two-person ribeye (the others being Cornish hen, lamb chops, and branzino at $55-$72). Instead I got to try three of the wonderful pastas, all made in house. Diab says one of his farmer-suppliers comes in during the off-season to work the pasta extruder, which is “therapeutic.”
It’s hard to pick a favorite pasta, but let’s say the mafaldine with shrimp and clams. Mafaldine is a wide pasta with wavy edges like you see on lasagna; Diab’s is dark with squid ink. Seldom have I had such exquisite shrimp or such a thrilling sauce.
Agnolotti is a stuffed pasta, like ravioli, and here the filling is two squashes: honeynut (like a smaller butternut) and Koginut, new to me, which specialtyproduce.com describes as “very sweet, nutty flavor with notes of citrus and vanilla.” The variety was only developed and released five years ago and apparently became popular with chefs. I concur. This is like a traditional fall dish but at another level of sumptuousness.
The most surprising pasta was tagliatelle bolognese, ordered by a must-have-meat kind of guy. Its main flavor was rosemary, not veal or beef, and it’s topped with comforting blobs of snowy, buttery stracciatella. Stracciatella is the innards of burrata. Diab says he stretches cheese curds in salted water, shreds them by hand, and mixes the strands with cream seasoned with sea salt. Other pastas, each distinct, are topped with porcini, parsnips, and hazelnuts; a tomato blush sauce with housemade ricotta; or a simple cacio e pepe with mushrooms.
By the time you read this a liquor license will soon be in place; Diab foresees a focus on amaros, the bitter after-dinner liqueur, as well as wines by the glass and bottle. When I visited, I settled for creative mocktails, all made from ingredients cold-pressed or pickled in-house. The gorgeous pink Pear Cranberry Sour was topped with foam and paper-thin circles of cranberry — think about the skill it would take to hold a cranberry still for slicing. It’s sweet and barely sour, with undertones of ginger. The Concord Grape Soda was a tall glass with a hint of cinnamon.
Dessert is a $16 slice of olive oil cake or a few gelato choices. The gianduja gelato, where you taste both the chocolate and the hazelnut, is so good that a single scoop is enough. The cake was excellently moist for a perfect texture and strongly redolent of orange.
That granola, by the way, had a good toasty flavor and left me wanting more. The only downside to Tiliani is the prices, which seemed no barrier to the folks filling the room.
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