Searching for Italy at Tom Colicchio’s New Restaurant

Seasonal Italian cooking should be a natural move for the chef. But Vallata doesn’t quite get off the ground.

The problem with Tom Colicchio’s new restaurant, Vallata, isn’t the cooking, most of which is very good and some of which is wonderful. All of it is Italian, in a rustic trattoria style based on ingredients plucked from the Union Square Greenmarket, a few blocks from Vallata’s location on East 19th Street. “Colicchio cooks Italian” may not be a revolutionary idea, but at least it’s a coherent one that hasn’t been tried before. The trouble is that the food raises expectations for the rest of the experience that Mr. Colicchio doesn’t follow through on, or even seems aware of. The cooking puts Vallata in direct competition with Via Carota, Lilia, Misi, Vic’s and Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria, for starters. Each of those places has an atmosphere that is calibrated to pull you into one vision of European casual dining or another, from the architect-designed farmhouse look of Misi to the “Antiques Roadshow” clutter of Via Carota. After opening in April as a temporary pop-up, Vallata is getting permanent status, Mr. Colicchio said in a phone call on Monday. It hasn’t been given an atmosphere of its own, though. The dining room, next door to Mr. Colicchio’s flagship, Craft, is an awkward pastiche of bland, vaguely corporate design and odd decorative hand-me-downs that have served time in other Colicchio restaurants.