Chicken Reported to Be Doing Well After Successful Restaurant Transplant

Barbuto, Jonathan Waxman’s long-running West Village restaurant, has brought its charms to a new address, including that celebrated roast chicken.

When the chef Jonathan Waxman opened Barbuto in 2004, the bookies of the food scene put long odds on its survival. Since making Jams into one of the defining New York feeding grounds of the 1980s and then losing it and two other restaurants by the end of the decade, Mr. Waxman had become something of a drifting gunman for hire, moving from one consulting job to another. One veteran critic told me confidently, when I said this new place looked promising, “He’ll be gone in a year.”

In fact, Mr. Waxman was still there delivering his idea of Italian cooking 15 years later, when a new landlord who had bought Barbuto’s building just south of the meatpacking district chose to let the lease expire. By that time Barbuto had outlasted dozens of nearby restaurants that had been deliriously greeted when they appeared, only to sink without a ripple some time later. Barbuto never changed chefs or adopted a tasting menu or went Nordic or eliminated meat or introduced an elaborate main course for 12 that had to be ordered weeks in advance or did anything else that made news, although just about every food publication in town took its turn admiring the roasted half-chicken under a shaggy patch of salsa verde.

Until its final month, May 2019, when it put out a video of the staff singing a theatrical farewell to the tune of “One Day More” from “Les Misérables,” Barbuto did very little for attention. It went about its business with a cool, steady assurance that if it kept doing things its way, people who knew the difference between heat and light would notice. Many people did, and they found it impossible, or at least unpleasant, to imagine downtown Manhattan without Barbuto.