Dining Out: Erbaluce

Charles Draghi cooks the way he wants to. Most chefs who have their own restaurants do, of course. I mention this because it's not the way I want him to cook. Draghi first came to my admiring attention more than 10 years ago, when he took over a hack-level North End restaurant, Marcuccio's, and turned it into a destination where everything was made from scratch, informed by Draghi's childhood summers in Piedmont, the wine and cheese stronghold of northwest Italy.

That gig ended, and so did another at a short-lived Back Bay restaurant, whose owners didn't share Draghi's vision of purity. Or something like that. Who can say why chef-owner marriages are seldom enduring, but they are, and that's the reason so many chefs want to be owners. The road to independence was long for Draghi, who along the way worked in the back and front of various restaurants with Joan Johnson, his partner.

At last, they've arrived. Erbaluce, named for a rare Piedmont grape, is a cozy, bright, trim place near Park Square. Johnson, as general manager, couldn't be nicer, or the waitstaff more helpful. The big bar is lively and comfortable, and has its own menu of simple Italian food—soups, pastas—to go with its unusual and moderately priced northern Italian wine list.

The menu in the main restaurant is less simple, and that's where I wish Draghi would hew a bit more closely to the classics he knows and makes so well. He's built herbs and spices—lots of them—into the DNA of practically every dish. Even in winter, you'll find copious preserved herbs, some from Draghi's Belmont garden, others from the woods of Ellington, the small northeastern Connecticut town where he attended high school. This is Draghi's version of the kind of high-tech experimentation that many other chefs are using to make their mark. All great cuisines use herbs and spices, of course, and I certainly prefer lavender and lemon thyme to the xanthan gum and sodium borohydride of molecular gastronomy. But in their sheer profusion and unfamiliar combinations, Draghi’s use of spices sometimes recalls medieval more than modern Italy.

Perhaps the picture will sharpen now that Draghi has assembled his "dream team," a group of chefs he's worked with through the years. Indeed, over the course of several meals, I could see things come into focus—including the most interesting fish and seafood I've seen and tasted in a long time.