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.