Paesant press

I SOMETIMES ASK my wife to bring back a menu when she goes out for dinner with her informal dining group, and if she happens to remember, I can usually guess, with about 90 percent accuracy, exactly which dishes were ordered by whom. The screenwriter gravitates toward the more fundamental sorts of innards, and the magazine writer gets the chicken. My wife has the scariest thing on the menu (cocks’ combs, baby eels), and the host, who is a good sport about these things, invariably settles for the second-scariest (roe-bearing scallops, monkfish liver with lemon verbena). The starving artist orders the most extravagant item, usually lobster. And the chef, even when faced with the most dazzling examples of culinary virtuosity, always orders a steak, extra rare. She can’t help herself. It comes with the job.

Some of us go to swank restaurants to experience the creativity of chefs. But to chefs themselves, who have been thinking about this stuff all day, restaurants are all about product, the stinkier the better: blood sausages and roasted marrow-bones, runny Epoisses and glistening sacs of shad roe, lamb kidneys and grilled mackerel ... and above all, meat: book-thick slabs of animal, dripping rare, ripened to the vaporous reek of strong cheese. Chefs also adore the most basic, atavistic cooking methods: Braising is good, spit-roasting is even better, and if a restaurant found a way to domesticate a campfire, chefs would be the first ones through the door, brandishing bacon-wrapped quail on sticks.

If you spent the better part of your workday dismembering chickens, you, too, might have leanings toward the darker reaches of the food chain, the taste for stench and slime and smoky fires that separates those of us who know how to debone a quail from those of us who do not.

The original Spago, oddly enough, was designed as something of a chefs’ hangout, a trattoria where they might stop by postmidnight, after work, for wood-grilled pizza and a bowl of noodles. And then there’s Blue Ribbon, a SoHo restaurant whose location, ultralate hours, and menu of oysters, big meat, and various squishies might well qualify it as an ethnic restaurant, were the kingdom of the kitchen ever to be thought of as a passport-issuing entity, To show up there at three in the morning without fresh sheet-pan burns on your arms and bits of flour in your hair is like being the only O’Malley at Umberto’s Clam House.

Chefs are the people you see in those hole-in-the-wall Colombian restaurants “ making meals of tripe soup, arepas, and grilled small intestines. Chefs are the ( guys on the next stool in your local bar, the ones for whom the bartender stocks the weird stuff, like poire William and Chartreuse. Half the population of Manhattan may want to be where the party is, but it’s the chefs who know who’s doing the catering.

WHICH BRINGS US to Peasant, a Lower East Side Italian restaurant that seems to be to the toque crowd at the moment what the Russian Tea Room once was to virtuosos of the violin. When it opened, Peasant was a “hot” reservation, yet another bar with three-week waits for tables, a clientele of suits and supermodels, and the sort of door policy that invites every-body but regulars to dine at 5:30 P.M. or not at all. The food was better than it tends to be at those places, which often have the life expectancy of mayflies, but despite the restaurant’s appealing conceit, the crush of fashionistas kept away most of the foodies.

So it was something of a surprise to realize that after the heat of celebrities had died down and the smoke of PR parties had lifted, Peasant had become the stomping ground of ... chefs. Le Bernardin’s Eric Ripert praised the restaurant and its chef, Frank DeCarlo, to everyone who would listen. Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Wylie Dufresne, among others, are reputedly regulars.

I had heard that Peasant was some-thing of a chefs’ hangout, but I was still

surprised when I dropped into the restaurant on a slow Tuesday night and Alain Ducasse, Paul Bocuse, and Jean-Louis Palladin plopped down at the next table to inhale cuttlefish and wood-roasted sardines. It was like going into a sports bar and finding yourself sitting next to Michael Jordan, Pedro Martinez, and Muhammad Ali.

“You know,” said Ducasse, peering thoughtfully into a glass of Sassoalloro, “this place is not so bad.”

Peasant is a cave of a place, a slightly biomorphic storefront tucked into a block of funky boutiques near the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a dim, brickwalled former garage that recedes into the leaping flames and sinister red glow of the open kitchen beyond.

When urban rustic cuisine invaded California kitchens in the late ’80s, it seemed vaguely ridiculous even then – the idea of dealmakers and commodities traders exhausting their expense accounts in an attempt to duplicate the cooking of impoverished Tuscan peasants. At Peasant, it seemed even sillier that, in a neighborhood where wholesale bakeries were being priced out of their industrial buildings by joints that sell $450 stiletto-heel mules, a chef had bothered to build his own brick oven from scratch and rig his own rotisserie, determined to cook everything but pasta in an apparatus decidedly pre – Industrial Revolution in design.

DeCarlo’s meager diet is as simple as it gets: good ingredients inflected with fire and garlic – skate wing with capers, chewy roasted razor clams, herb-stuffed whole Mediterranean fish flavored with lemon, fine olive oil, fresh herbs, and generous sprinklings of salt. Crisp-skinned baby chickens twirl on spits. You can almost imagine DeCarlo as a pitchman on a late-night infomercial, passing hundreds of dishes through a fireplace as he declares it the only appliance you will ever need.

One after another, ingredients are laid into rustic pottery bowls, roasted in the oven, and brought to the table still sputtering little geysers of olive oil and garlic: tiny balls of fresh mozzarella flattened and blistered from the heat, cooked with candy-sweet currant tomatoes; small sliced cuttlefish in a tomato broth. Wonderful fat sardines, squeezed together like rush-hour passengers in a subway car, sizzle with herbs and oil. Roast rabbit, moist and almost as gamy as wild rabbit, is served in terra-cotta atop what seems like a full quart of beans.

Porchetta, underseasoned and a little dry, may not erase memories of the porchetta trucks parked by every cross-roads in Umbria, but it is definitely good enough. Pastas, with the possible exception of the tomato-sauced bucatini with banana-size langoustines, are beside the point here, and the giant gnocchi are definitely from the Stay Puft marshmallow school of gnocchi making.

But brawny-crusted pizzas are brought to the table charred and still smoking, not dissimilar to the definitive New York pizza cooked in the ancient coal ovens of Lombardi’s, just a couple of blocks away – the pie with peperoncini and soppressata is just about as spicy as Italian food gets, a breath from a Calabrian blast furnace. The osso buco is so soft it practically collapses in on itself. And the steak, a big, rare thing rubbed with olive oil and salt, is everything a carnivorous chef could want.

PEASANT

194 Elizabeth Street

212-965-9511

Dinner Tuesday through Sunday:

main courses, $18 to $24