Ian McNulty: Here’s a first look at TANA, Old Metairie’s new upscale Italian restaurant

With his Sicilian heritage and fine dining chops, people have long asked chef Michael Gulotta if he’d ever open an Italian restaurant. Finally, his answer is yes and this one is a stunner.

TANA officially opened Thursday after a long build-out and a furious few nights of trial runs (one of which I attended).

It stands on a stretch of Metairie Road where there’s been so much commercial development lately that the white box of a building the restaurant calls home seemed to blend in as its new construction took shape.

Step inside though and it is immediately clear this is a restaurant conceived and designed to stand out.

The culinary end of TANA is the domain of Gulotta and his business partner, Jeffrey Bybee, who together also run the New Orleans restaurants MoPho and Maypop.

They’ve had the idea for TANA drawn up for years. To bring it about, they teamed with a business partner who is big on new development in Old Metairie.

That's Gabe Corchiani, the local businessman who started his Fat Boy’s Pizza brand nearby among other projects (Note: Corchiani is partners in other companies with John Georges, owner of The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate).

Corchiani said he was determined to make a showpiece restaurant that in style and elegance could stand next to the best in the city, and with a lounge that can serve as an independent destination from dinner for before and after outings. For the design, he brought in Audra Brewer, owner of the local firm Distressed Rentals.

Italian blend, add pasta cart

The opening menu is a blend of three influences: Liguria, the Italian coastal region near the French border where Gulotta trained as a young chef; Sicily, where he traced his roots; and Louisiana, for a dash of local ingredients.

The cuisine of Liguria tends to be lighter and brighter than Sicilian, drawing influences from neighboring Provence. The pesto sauce for a red snapper entrée and a fried calamari interspersed with fried zucchini are representative.

The Sicilian side of things comes through in radiatori pasta in red gravy, veal marsala and a king-sized, bone-in pork chop parmesan, deeply breaded and coated with cheese and about as subtle as a St. Joseph's Day parade in the French Quarter.

Louisiana has its say not in the familiar Creole Italian way but with dishes like pasta with clams and a hit of Patton’s hot sausage, or the extravagant barbecue lobster done in the buttery style of barbecue shrimp sauce.

House-made pasta is a cornerstone of the menu, and the pasta-making station is situated right in the dining room. Dayle Thornton has been making pasta with Gulotta for seven years at Maypop, and has earned the nickname "Pasta Mama." She preps here during the day, with the tools of the trade on display at night.

There’s also a cart that can roll right up tableside for a preparation of tagliatelle alla ruota, better known as cheese wheel pasta, with the hot noodles finished within the "bowl" of the parmesan wheel.

More subtle details add to the full picture of the chef's ambition for TANA. The butter for bread service, for instance, is larded with pig neck fat, and yes that really does make a difference in its savory succulence against a seeded Italian bread twist.

Rustic meets elegant, starting in lounge

Before even cutting into the menu, TANA makes a striking impression through a flow of different spaces. That starts in the lounge with deep, scalloped booths, a glowing marble bar, a vault locking away prestige whiskeys and rustic-seeming rafter beams high above.

The lounge is just that, with small tables for drinks only. In the lounge, the full restaurant menu is served only at seats at the bar.

The dining room continues the rustic-meets-elegant blend of styles with custom built furniture, designs traced into the floor, woven basket light fixtures and gorgeous serving ware and utensils. A partially frosted window gives a glimpse into the kitchen and it’s a beautiful new one built for high volume.

In addition to the main dining room, there’s a private dining room with a clean-lined Mediterranean look that can also serve as the restaurant’s second dining room on busy nights. There's also a small open-air patio in back. The restaurant has about 110 seats in the dining rooms, and another 40 in the lounge.

Deep wine, Old Metairie beginnings

Behind the bar is TANA’s wine cellar, glassed in for display and overseen by sommelier Steve Russett. His résumé includes rebuilding the wine program at Emeril’s Restaurant after Hurricane Katrina and he was later wine director at Restaurant R’evolution.

Much like that latter restaurant, the wine list at TANA arrives on a handheld computer pad, illuminating the selection (the dinner menus also have a subtle illumination behind the pages, intended to keep the cellphone flashlights at bay).

This is a deep wine list that ranges from the $40s to the four figures (for an easy starting point, try the Michele Chiarlo Barbera d'Asti, which plays well across this menu).

Gulotta named TANA for his grandmother, Gaetana. He and Bybee have had this concept cooking for years, and indeed we got an early taste of it a few years back when they introduced a much smaller version of TANA from the kitchen at the Tulane Avenue lounge Treo. That concept ran its course, and Treo has since closed.

But anyone who visited back then will recognize the approach now on a much more ambitious scale and vastly grander stage.

It arrives now in an Old Metairie restaurant scene that is really hitting its stride, with the impressive Garrison Kitchen + Cocktails just across the street and casual new additions turning up nearby (see Las Cruces Tex Mex and the latest Felipe's Taqueria).

The idea may be to give people more dining choices close to their own neighborhoods. But with this kind of cooking, in this setting, TANA is contributing to Old Metairie as a dining destination in its own right.   

TANA

2919 Metairie Road, (504) 533-8262

Dinner Wed.-Thu., Sun.-Mon: 5-9 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 5-10 p.m.

(lounge opens 4:30 p.m.)

Love New Orleans food? Pull up a seat at the table. Join Where NOLA Eats, the hub for food and dining coverage in New Orleans.

Follow Where NOLA Eats on Instagram at @wherenolaeats, join the Where NOLA Eats Facebook group and subscribe to the free Where NOLA Eats weekly newsletter here.