...in East Harlem.

My wife and I love their cookbook and the notes on the jacket claim that their establishment is lengendary. Only ten tables and always booked months in advance.

Has anyone been there? How was it.

Thank you.

Dean.

Hi Dean

At least to a non-New Yorker like me, an East-Harlem location for a popular restaurant sounds quite unusual (I understand the area is quite dangerous, is this true ?) so I searched for and found the place's website http://www.raos.com .

It looks like their using the popularity of the place to market a line of products which includes pasta sauces, dressings and marinades. This is of course their good right but in my experience, places which do this so extensively (e.g. Maxims of Paris, Anton Mosimann) rarely live up to their name. NYC has so many good restaurants that having to reserve a table weeks in advance to me looks like a sign that people visit the place more for its ambience and celebrity status than its food.

I of course could be totally of base here. If you do manage to get a table, please report your experience.

Regards

Hans

I'm happy to report that the restaurant is not the tourist trap that its branching out into sauces would have you believe (unlike Patsy's and some other popular joints). Would I rate it a top notch Italian restaurant in the league of Il Molino's? No. The food is better than your average midtown Italian, but better food could be found elsewhere. A big part of the appeal of the restaurant is the "experience". Very few people can regularly land a table there and most people have the incorrect view that the location is dangerous. So eating at Rao's is seen as a symbol of clout and "connections", two very important things in the culture of NYC. The restaurant itself is refreshing in that celeb's eating there aren't treated any different than anyone else. There is no "hollywood scene", everyone lets their hair down and the restaurant has the feeling of a small private club. As to how I got in, I happen to be a family friend of an old-time Italian-American actor and I go as his guest.

I first heard of Rao's when my wife came home with a bottle of their marinara sauce ...which is, for us, as good as sauce from a bottle gets. In fact, we like it so much that we rarely bother with home-made sauce any more.

Based on the quality of the sauce I bought my wife the Rao's cook book and we have really liked every recipe we've tried. So, I was curious to know if their claims about their restaurant were true.

It's nice to know that the food is good, the event an "experience" and that it is not in a bad neighborhood. I hope we can try it one day ...but alas, I am the most famous person we know and I haven't any connections.



Dean.