Restaurant hagiography: Bianca

What struck me first about Bianca was how much it resembles Upper West Side Italian restaurant Celeste. Not so much the decor, but the dishes and prices all looked familiar. Turns out Bianca's officially the downtown version of Celeste, but the real difference with Bianca is the Gorgonzola gnocchi. As a connoisseur of the some-pasta- with-your-cheese? genre, I'd have to say, this one makes the rest taste like Kraft or, worse, like whatever combination one comes up with when, due to a lack of grocery shopping, the only cheese around is one that doesn't make sense to put on pasta (say, Camembert), but ends up on it for lack of other options. In other words, that was some good gnocchi.

A man at a table next to ours ordered what appeared to be the thinly-sliced filet mignon with rosemary. At $15 that was the most expensive thing on the mostly-sub-$10 menu, which by NoHo standards is respectable but by graduate student standards (not to mention person-who'd-just-eaten- a-plate-of-gnocchi standards) it seemed excessive, which is not to say I won't go back and try that and everything else on the menu.