Sifton Soundtracks: Mia Dona b/w The Members, "The Sound of the Suburbs"

It's a huevo de gallina for Mia Dona. Sifton appears to be saving his A game for loftier fare. It's disappointing. Based on complaints in Chowyelpistan that nobody reading the NYT food section should be expected to know who Liev Schreiber* is, I had the exciting idea of annotating his next review as a public service. But, jeebs, Sifton gets about as deep as a kiddie pool this time out. Counting Crows? Even the Applebee's reviewing Silent Majority knows who they are. But it does sound like the kind of place that's hard to get excited about, and is on Sifton's radar primarily because of the place it used to be before Psilakis left. So, like kudos for getting through the writeup without mentioning Olive Garden.  But Sifton does get to remind you where he grinds:

And so here is the new, chef-less iteration of Mia Dona: exactly the sort of decent, middlebrow, red-sauce Italian restaurant you’d relish if you found it in a town near the town where you grew up in the suburbs of New York. Within the five boroughs of New York City, we call that sort of restaurant satisfactory.

The enthusiasm Sifton brings to having NYC as his beat in nearly every review is infectious, mostly. It's as if he spend his formative years chained by the ankle to the steam table at a Ponderosa, and is happy to be eating better than that.

But the review is criminally thin on soundtrack inspiration. With its invocation of the red sauce places of yore, Sifton dares you to go with "Scenes from  an Italian Restaurant," but the Cod is congenitally allergic to Billy Joel, who is the Lynyrd Skynyrd of Tri-State fifty-something hausfrauen. Thus a song to play off Mia Dona, back to where it belongs, which is to say not in New York Fucking City, where solid Italian food is not good enough.

 

*I can think of at least two folks who would be happy to tell you that Schreiber is to sex what the stickle is to the pickle.