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Bacco ascends to culinary heights with its subtle flavors, fresh ingredients and overall simple elegance
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Several years ago, a now departed top executive at the Detroit Free Press and his wife were vacationing in St. Tropez on the French Riviera. They decided to catch up with Detroit-area friends staying in another seaside village nearby.
The four agreed to meet at a small provincial restaurant called Le Sarasin, in Ste. Maxime, a much less posh and tiny village, and a ferryboat ride across the bay from St. Tropez.
It was the wife’s first visit to the area, and from the moment she sat down at dinner she began a nonstop stream of excited chatter about every aspect of what she had seen and done.
The first course arrived. Then a second. And finally, as the main course made its way to their table, so did a royally frustrated chef who had been listening. He presented himself stiffly to his guests with dishes in hand and blurted in broken English: “Madame, why do you not please shut up and let the food speak to you!”
Whether or not the chef’s cooking at Le Sarasin was worthy of his demand, his point is well worth noting. There are moments in dining that approach a religious experience, moments when great food plays so powerfully on the senses that it mutes all else.
During recent visits to Bacco in Southfield, four dishes actually stopped conversations, and twice it happened with the same pasta dish, on each of two visits.
The dish is a second course, a plate of two pastas. The first is Cavatelli al Porcini: a fresh porcini sauce with cream and white wine on little shell pasta. The second is a Bacco signature pasta called Strozzapreti Norcina: a sauce made at the restaurant of Italian sausage (made totally in house also), black truffles, tomato and white wine, and then tossed in a pasta directly imported from Italy at a cost of $7 a pound. Most pastas used by restaurants run 60 cents to $1 a pound.
“Strozzapreti” translates as the “priest strangler.” The pasta is rolled by hand and made from the finest durum wheat and purest water of the Abruzzo region. “The eggs they use are so fresh, you can just smell them!” exclaims chef-owner Luciano Del Signore. The “Norcina” part of the name refers to the style of the sauce, which is made as they do it in the village of Norcia, a center of truffle gathering in Tuscany.
Both pastas are almost pure art. The sauces are as subtle as listening to jazz great Bill Evans play piano: You become transported through one layer after another as they unroll distinctly with each forkful, revealing a little more texture and a different flavor with each bite. And that’s just one of the highlights at Bacco.
Overall, the cuisine at Bacco is as close to perfection as we have found in the last year in the Detroit area, which is why we have chosen it as Hour Detroit’s 2005 Restaurant of the Year.
Bacco is a meteor. A top-end, modern Italian restaurant that has excelled so much and so fast in its two-plus years that it could easily be dropped, as it is, into London, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco and still be competitive in those markets.
An example of how and why: Carluccio’s is a popular modern-Italian London restaurant that just opened a second location in posh South Kensington. It has a similar look and feel. (Bacco is smaller.) I ate at Carluccio’s just two days before a second visit to Bacco, and I even had two identical dishes at both. And, hands down, Bacco is superior.
In appearance, Bacco is a simple, stylish, bright and airy restaurant. Located on Northwestern Highway in Southfield where Ristorante di Modesta used to be, it opened in 2002 and has gradually become one of the most premier dining spots in the city. Del Signore and his business partner and wife, Monica, and their family also are owners of the longtime Livonia restaurant Fonte d’Amore.
Bacco is surprisingly small, yet it seats 100. When it’s full it feels cramped, although the Del Signores have done the most they can with design to minimize that effect.
A measure of success in Detroit has always been the level of exotic automotive hardware that people drive. And what pulls up every other minute at the valet parking for dinner reveals that Bacco is clearly catering to Detroit’s most affluent crowd: Lamborghinis, Maseratis and Porsche SUVs relegate the mundane Cadillacs, Mercedes and BMWs to the back lot, where transportation for the hired help is stacked.
Inside the front door stands a wall full of wine lockers festooned with brass plaques on which are engraved names of famous clients: Jacques Nasser, departed head of Ford Motor Co., and several architects, lawyers and real estate magnates among them. At Bacco, clients who join a “club” can buy wine at store prices through a retail license the restaurant has, and keep it in a locker to use at lunch or dinner visits. The savings range from 50 to 100 percent over average restaurant pricing.
Behind the check-in stand, which is overseen most evenings by Monica, are a handsome cherrywood bar, two booths and a couple of tables that can handle guest overflow from the dining room.
The decor at Bacco is simple and elegant. Gray walls are dotted with richly framed prints and canvases. A colorful fresco depicting the wine god Bacchus painted by muralist Barney Judge, whose works are also in the Motor City Casino and Shiraz, circles a recessed dome in the ceiling above the center of the dining room.
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