“That’s our chef’s philosophy: waste not, want not”, said our server at Incanto Monday night. That’s the story of Incanto; and even though it’s most widely characterized by the inventive use of offal on its menu, one thing I truly love about Chef Chris Cosentino’s work there is that it doesn’t stop there.

We shared an antipasta of local, cured sardines with green peaches, capers, and carefully strewn celery leaves. The line our server used was, in fact, in reference to those green peaches (apparently pre-peach hard fruits that most farmers clear so their summer peaches are warmer and juicier). The thin, chewy slices of peach cut through the oiliness of the sardines perfectly, and also provided a color accompaniment to the capers and celery leaves. A beautiful dish.

Not wanting to have a full-blown (and wallet-blowing) dinner, we decided to share a couple of pastas. We had the pappardelle with lamb sugo, because that’s just irresistible, and the pork heart ravioli with pine nuts. This leads me to the second thing that I really love about Incanto. The ravioli were really good. Perfectly cooked pasta, the raw pine nuts a flavor foil for the meaty goodness of the pork heart. But truth be told the pappardelle was even better. The lamb sugo was made with mint and olives, and it was by far the best lamb/mint combination I’ve ever experienced. What I mean is that when I go to Incanto, of course I look at it as a way to try offal and other less typical cuts of meat cooked in an expert way, but the more traditional dishes are just as sublime. The range of the menu is actually quite wide: a (gulp) vegetarian could have a fantastic meal. I think I counted half of the antipasti as meat-free, and there were more than adequate choices of pasta and entrée.

Alli and I get kind of a kick out of the…is there a euphemism for this?..uh, relative unhipness of the space there. Incanto, décor-wise, is the diametric opposite of, say, Slanted Door. The big bright windows, the carpet, the kids, the elderly. As Alli pointed out, for the total youth and hipness of the cooking, the philosophy, and the diy salumi company, the atmosphere is decidedly different. But thinking of it now, it’s done in a way that’s a lot more in accord with the restaurants we loved in Italy. Delfina restaurant in San Francisco is about 150 years “ahead” of Ristorante Delfina in Artimino, in terms of restaurant architecture, but there is something very homey and pleasing about carpets and evening light and elderly patrons!

I think I’ve come to admire Cosentino’s work not only as your run-of-the-mill foodie and home cook, but also as a citizen. It seems to me to be wildly successful (the dining room was packed on a Monday night), and people were clearly pleased. The older couple next to us were getting an education in ingredients (“what are ramps?” “what’s agretti?”) as much as we were (“this is what pork heart tastes like”, “green peaches!”). And to gather these people into a real life economy of respect for produce and animals is a beautiful, and politically gratifying, gesture.

post script: I know that if you have a food blog, you’re supposed to take pictures when you go to restaurants, and not just steal some image of salumi from Google images. I know! But I just can’t do it. I can’t do it! To make it up to you, though, I will take some pictures of the cocktail week party at the Ferry Building tonight, that is, if I’m sober enough to point and click.