Vero Wine Bar Inaugural Review Our Coverage Sponsored by Fresh Origins
From the Truffle Mac & Cheese, above, to the Seared Yellowfin Tuna, below, Vero Wine Bar is more than a sip of your favorite vino
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It's not who you know, it's Whom You Know and we know Sammy Musovic as we worked with him ages ago on another of his venues. In November of 2013, he acquired Vero Wine Bar on the Upper East Side along with London native Toral Odedra, whom we were delighted to meet. She tells us: "Here at Vero, Sammy and I are proud to honor the Italian language in 'Vero' which means true in Italian. Both our wine and our cuisine reflect the authenticity of Italy in our exquisite neighborhood of the Upper East Side."
We don't feature many wine bars on Whom You Know as we don't feel many are competitive with the restaurants we've recommended, but Vero boasts quality plates that impressed us on our first visit. Under "Plates" you'll find Nona's Stuffed Meatballs, which we began with. The duo of beef meatballs are enhanced with buffalo mozzarella, spicy tomato roasted pepper misto and pressed ciabatta toast comes on the side so you don't miss any of the sauce: a substantial side that we'd try again.
We were really impressed with the salad quality. There are five salad options and we chose the Vero Chop, their signature edition. It was well-chopped and proportionally the components made sense. Romaine, feta, sweet onion, red pepper, tomato, cucumber, chickpea and currants teamed up with a refreshing lemon vinaigrette. We liked the currant accent quite a lot and we don't see them often in salads but we should.
We absolutely love mac and cheese, no matter how sophisticated you may think we are, have become or will become. Anyone that says that they don't like cheese and pasta together must be lying. We like truffle anything even better, so the combination made this our favorite of the night. Truffle Mac and Cheese is embellished with fabulous fontina and truffle oil and spirals of pasta make this an even more winning dish. They use this truffle oil:
The Seared Yellowfin Tuna was the best presentation of the night in terms of plate arrangement: watercress, baby potato, hard boiled egg, pear tomato, and cracked olive dance in a wonderfully creative sherry-shallot vinaigrette that circles the lovely poisson. What a beauty! You are not going to see too many wine bars do a dish of this quality and we'd order this again. The tuna was sublime and sliced to perfection along with the eggs. We love eggs and they should be on more menus too.
A superbly creative antipasti that we really liked was the Truffle Egg Toast: pullman toast with a baked egg center topped with fontina cheese, truffle oil and grilled asparagus, which was the perfect touch of color and nutrition.
We look forward to seeing what Vero Wine Bar does next and other tricks up Sammy's sleeve.
