Pulinio's Bar and Pizzeria

I've been sort of infatuated with San Francisco since my visit a little more than a year ago, and so when I heard that the city's famed young farm to table "rock star" Nate Appleman was opening a restaurant here in New York, I was excited to visit.  And Pulino's is good - we had a truly marvelous shoulder pork chop with some of the most flavorful salsa verde I've ever had, and an excellent (though far below a Motorino) pizza with pungent chili oil on the side.  Like the New York Times, I loved the $18 carafes of decent wine - if the seats weren't so uncomfortable, one could get very happy here on a couple orders of the pork and 3 or 4 carafes of the soft, fruity, primitivo. 

On the other hand, the appetizers were disappointing - the nduja (supposedly a soft, spreadable, sicilian sausage) was a little bland and (somehow) not fatty enough, while my own preparation of white beans with tomato sauce is actually better than the one I had there.  Most annoying, though, is the fact that Pulino's is still the kind of place where people come to flaunt their new body augmentations (like our neighbors) rather than eat - I'm confident all will be better once those people filter out and a few more less chiseled specimens belly into the cramped but refreshing restaurant.