The Cookery - Everybody loves it and so do we!

There is a saying that before deciding on a new restaurant, one should try it twice. Well if the restaurant is Dave Di Bari's cookery , in Dobbs Ferry, you can actually very happily take this advice and want to go several times again for good measure. The first time we wanted to try the place was on mother's day but they do not take reservations for small groups and that really is not the day to go to such a well liked place, without reservations.

Well, recently Anshul and I celebrated a decade of marriage, actually that also makes it ten years of living in Westchester County. The food scene has changed a lot for the better in these past few years, in fact restaurants like the cookery are quite symbolic of this change. This place was just lovely in its casual comfortable set-up. It has some really nice homey touches, like bread being served in ricotta cartons, comfortable aged wood tables, cotton kitchen towels being used as napkins.


The menu should have just been a small plates menu, since their appetizers were so good we did not even get to the main course. In fact, they were a little startled to see us make a meal of the appetizers. I did get back there at lunchtime and try one of their pasta's with a friend. What we loved was the polenta with lamb sausage (I wonder where one can find some). The creamy polenta was gently laced with apricots and some tomato jam. The pork a la plancha was just so amazingly soft. The calamari in the calamari salad was soft and well done.

We did try the easter pie, above this was actually a little too salty for us. It essentially is an Italian version of a quiche. We also tried the grilled scamozza cheese with tomato jam. This is something we might get again if we return back with the kids. It was a little too heavy for us. The tomato jam while very good, I think is a little too extended in its use.

I returned and tried the ricotta crostino, which was very interesing since the bread had been heated on the grill adding a lovely rustic touch to the bread. The organic lettuce salad was nice and refreshing, the dressing had a very distinct taste of lemon zest.

We tried the radiatore with lamb although the mint could be a little more pronounced. This restaurant overall is an amazing blend of sophisticated comfort food. The overall beauty of the compact menu is that it would be really easy to zone in on which dishes work for you and which do not. If there was one change that I could make, I would lose the TV - I know it is in the bar area but for such a compact place, the event does spill over to the dining area.