Domenica is the maximum current attempt to duplicate certain culinary practices very common in Italy but rarely seen here. There are three major specialties. The best is pizza, baked in a five-ton, wood-fired oven made of stone. The chef makes a showy array of salumi, curing meats for months in house. The remainder of the menu uses pasta, meats and seafood in about three dozen small and large dishes, most of them rustic in style. A large portion of the menu will be familiar to anyone who has been to Italy.
After over a year of planning (during which Chef Alon Shaya spent many months in Italy) Dominica opened in the fall of 2009, as nearly the last piece of the renewed Roosevelt Hotel. The restaurant's name is Italian for "Sunday," when in the glory days of the Roosevelt Hotel many local people went there for dinner. The hotel had a restaurant in this space for almost a hundred years--most recently Bailey's, the hotel's all-day restaurant.
The tall, wide room gets further spaciousness from a wall of windows looking to the rococo facade of Jesuit Church. Unclothed, rustic tables built of wood planks, topped with jars of long breadsticks, stand a bit too close to one another throughout the room, which is divided by massive square columns and split levels. What looks like the bar is actually the salumi station, where chefs work meat slicers on the cured meats in the glass-fronted walk-in cooler behind them.
Start with pizza, no matter what else you get. Then a little of the house-made salumi. The cheeses (other than burrata) are less impressive. Every afternoon from three until six, pizzas, cocktails, and wine by the glass is half-price. Israel-born Chef Alon Shaya creates special menus for the major Jewish holidays. They're not kosher--the restaurant has too much prosciutto hanging around for that--but otherwise very traditional and worth ordering, even if you're not Jewish.
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