As at Four Horsemen, where an oeuf mayonnaise is zebra-striped with squid ink and humble beans are treated like precious gems, Curtola trusts his diners to venture beyond obvious crowd-pleasers. I was impressed to see how many tables around me had ordered the nervetti, a chilled salad of beef tendons, cut sliver-thin, with shaved white onions and pickled chive blossoms. To my palate, the dish isn’t entirely successful—tendons are a textural ingredient more than a flavorful one, slippery and jiggly-wiggly, so over all it tastes like a scoop of marinated onions destined for an Italian sub—but folks seemed to be thrilled by it anyway. The pleasures of chewy textures are on better display in a shallow bowl of trofie, teeny-tiny handmade pasta twists cooked to a lovely springiness. They’re tossed in a shocking-green pesto, which is typically herbaceous and cheesy and has the unmistakable buttery-soft flavor armature of pounded pine nuts. Forget caviar, forget truffles: true luxury is sweet and resinous Italian pinoli, an increasingly precious crop that can run to more than a hundred dollars a kilo.