Spina
Over the weekend, Ken and I went on a double date with our friends, Hughie and Hana. They recently got engaged and are also moving in together so we decided to catch up with a fun dinner at Spina in Alphabet City.
Spina makes their own pastas at the back of the restaurant and they also have a great wine list. I purchased some packages for a set menu – each couple ordered two appetizers, two pastas, two desserts and one bottle of wine.
The server came by and brought us tomato sauce with olive oil as well as ricotta infused with truffle oil:
Both sauces went well with the foccaccia bread that was passed around the table.
For appetizers, I started with the caprese salad with grilled eggplant:
The fresh basil and the soft pillows of mozzarella made the salad a good choice to start off my dinner. I didn’t want to get anything hot because I figured the pasta would be pretty heavy, so this was a good start.
Ken and Hughie started out with the meatball tasting:
Hana ordered the prawns with shaved fennel:
For my main course, I ordered the agnolotti stuffed with confit duck legs and artichokes:
Hana ordered the squid ink pasta with clams and mussels:
Hughie ordered the orecchiette pasta with fresh snow peas:
And Ken ordered my favorite pasta – the gnocchi with pork, veal and beef ragu:
The pastas were all really delicious (although my first ravioli was a little undercooked). The sauce in Ken’s order reminded me of the pasta at Marea and luckily, Ken liked my pasta more because I was definitely a bigger fan of his.
For dessert, we ordered a bunch of stuff and shared – Hana ordered the gelato:
Hughie and Ken ordered the tiramisu:
And I ordered something that reminded me of a frozen key lime pie:
The meal was really good, although we were limited to two types of wines (one white and one red). The restaurant is definitely a nice place to go on a date but it’s a little out of the way for me. I’d love to try some of their other dishes (they have quite a lot of different types of fish that all looked great!)
