We dropped by Bottega Gabriele for a Friday lunch just after New Years, hoping to score what were promised to be some of the best focaccia sandwiches in the city. The interior is interesting - it's kind of modern homey, with bric-a-brac displayed on shelves around the room and LVP on the floors, but yet a bit industrial, with a refrigerated meat and cheese display in the center. It's all a bit discordant, but does seem like what family owned cafe in Italy would look like.
Mortadella Sandwich ($18.50) - The focaccia is is on the breadier side with a harder baked crust rather than the crisp oil-laden fried crust many other places serve (in fact, there's no oil whatsoever here). There's still a softness on the interior that helps to encapsulate the ingredients. It's cut in half and first slathered with a thick layer of ricotta. The cheese is heavy on the tongue, cloying, sickly fatty, and only occasionally punctuated by a sweet and spicy heat from the hot honey. Mortadella, sliced thin, is placed atop the cheese. The thickness of the cheese layer is easily twice or perhaps even three times as much as the meat. As a result, while mortadella typically has a savory spiced pork flavor and is studded with nutty pistachio, the flavors are muddled by the onslaught of ricotta. The ingredients lists lemon zest, which other reviews note gives a special zing to the sandwich to balance out some of the fat. Even knowing it's there, I couldn't discern a single hint of zestiness.
Looking at other photos, I don't see nearly as thick of a layer of cheese and further examining, I note that Bottega Gabriele has major consistency issues. Just take a look at the photos uploaded here on Yelp. In some sandwiches, mortadella, ricotta, and arugula are placed in that order in between the bread. In others, it's mortadella, arugula, and ricotta. And in my case, it's ricotta, mortadella, and arugula. And then note that some photos, there's more arugula than both meat and cheese combined. In some, there's more mortadella than greens and ricotta. And in others, like in my sandwich, there's way more cheese than meat. Consistency in both balance of ingredients and order of ingredients really does matter for sandwich construction and unfortunately Bottega Gabriele doesn't pass muster. (3/5)
Pancetta Sandwich ($19) - This is another sandwich with construction issues. In this case, there's the bottom slice of bread, followed by a drizzle of sweet balsamic, the meat, a layer of greens, then the burrata, walnuts, more balsamic, a hard wedge of pecorino (one per sandwich half), and finally the top slice of focaccia. The major issue here is the placement of the veggies and cheese. The soft and creamy burrata is needed to essentially 'glue' the harder walnuts and the pecorino to the rest of the sandwich. Unfortunately with it touching the bed of arugula, everything basically slides out as soon as the sandwich is lifted off the plate. I'm am not exaggerating when I say that upon lifting up my half for the first bite, the entire half of burrata and pecorino/walnuts slid out onto the plate.
In my case, the buratta is a relatively small piece (compared to the size of the bread), centered in the sandwich before being cut in half. I couldn't really find the exterior mozzarella layer, so it's possible that it's actually stracciatella. It's rich and creamy and is better balanced here with the other flavors of the sandwich compared to the mortadella. The thinly sliced pancetta on the bottom is wavy and ribbon-like. Some of it, especially along the edges of the sandwich is crisped up and becomes almost bacon-like in taste and texture.
The bread in this sandwich is toasted for far longer than for the mortadella. It gives a hard crisp throughout and really did a number on my hard palate while eating. And it doesn't do any favors to help cradle the ingredients, with the hardness increasing shear force, causing the interior to sputter out with every bite. I think the flavors are a little better balanced in this sandwich, albeit possibly leaning a bit too much into the very sweet balsamic glaze, but the construction really drags my rating down. (3/5)
I can tell that Bottega Gabriele uses high quality ingredients for their sandwiches. I wouldn't say they are necessarily bad, but when I eat a sandwich, I expect to be able to eat it with my hands and not have to scrounge half the ingredients off the plate to stuff back in while eating. I also think they really need to really need to standardize their sandwich construction and think about how to better balance the ingredients.
They have a 4.8 on Yelp and a 4.9 on Google, not to mention that I've never visited Italy before, so perhaps I'm the one that has the wrong expectations. On the other hand, according to the owners, they were in the process of moving to a different building so perhaps some consistency issues were from moving preparations.
Bathrooms - Single unisex room. read more