To and From the Trattoria

Trattoria Dopo Teatro

125 W. 44th st.

212-869-2849

Part of living in New York is noticing what happens on the way to somewhere, and on the way from there.

I sat on a thick stone ledge on Sixth Avenue, unkempt, pudgy and bleached. More people talk to me that way. A guy selling pretzels wandered over and told me how damn long he worked every day. "But I have to do it," he shrugged, another exile getting a raw deal but rolling with it.

I walked up two blocks to Trattoria, where comedian Mike Amato met me, apologizing for his t-shirt, but it's not really a dress-up spot anyway. Although the diners are not uniformly beautiful, this being a 44th Street pre-theater destination, the restaurant is both beautiful and overdone, which you want from an Italian place. My Italian stepmother has a chandelier in every single room of my small wooden childhood home, and I can only marvel at her panache.

The host, Marco, let us eat in the quieter Secret Garden room downstairs, so I could concentrate on the food and Amato, who just got back from Italy and Berlin.

"They were my two favorite places comfort-wise-I picked up girls on the train. American girls get hit on constantly by perverts, but I find it easy to talk to Italian girls. I pick up the language and I'm very flirty. I have romantic blood, but none of the Italian cheesiness! Everything Italian-American is Guidos, morons," Amato explained, sipping on his very reasonable $8 glass of Chianti.

Chef Lamorte sent out an order of Crespelle ai funghi ($9.50)-mushroom crepes to you and me, or at least Amato and I-and we marveled. I can fry up a portobello quesadilla at home, but these were homemade crepes wrapped around wild mushrooms, topped with a melted cheese sauce. That's why I go out. A lot.

Amato on stage is pompous and hysterical, whether he's talking or lip-synching to Perry Como.

"I have a smarmy but backward persona," he explained, "I have a high libido-I was told by a shrink I was a lesbian. I love women, and I hate men. I think they're idiots and I don't feel totally comfortable with them. I might have sex with a lot of women, but I fall in love with all of them. I was with this Lithuanian woman in Berlin. I made her tell me she loved me in Lithuanian, so there'd be a certain distance."

We tried some calamari sabbiati ($10.50), baby squid with orange and lemon sauce, and a few bread crumbs. Chef Lamorte is from Tuscany, and Tuscan food is pretty healthy, so there was no layer of deep fry to conceal the true physiognomy of that unlovely sea creature. Amato is a vegetarian, so I didn't get to compensate with any duck pasta or veal shank.

We did get a terrific sample of stracci al'astice ($18.50), which included fresh chunks of lobster, white wine, cherry tomatoes and sun dried pesto.

"Stracci means scraps; it's irregular, like us," Amato told me.

Chef Lamorte, who was Roberto to us by now, pointed out the spinach ravioli ($17.50).

"The ravioli is very thin pasta, very light."

He confirmed Amato's hunch that this dish was seasoned with sage, and it was nice of him to take the time considering that the two kitchens serve five theme rooms and handle upward of a thousand people a night. We were sort of closing the place, though, as it was midnight by now, and the pre-theater crowd and the business people were long gone.

We put away a Tuscan-style puff pastry, Amato flirted with a member of the staff, and then as we got on the subway he told me about Berlin: "They've got poor people paying low rent, hanging out and creating art-you get the sense they own the city. They have t-shirts saying 'Style as Fuck' and a goth shop called 'The Dark Store.'"

"You talking about Germany?" asked a big white kid in a stained shirt when we were on the train. I'd been admiring his stylized perch on the subway platform.

"The problem is they don't have to do anything-they just get money to live, and they don't do anything!" he told us, looking vaguely upset.