Piada
3 Clinton Street
(btw Houston and Stanton)
212-677-5415    
www.piadanyc.com

One of the qualities that separates great Italian food from other cultures is its elegant simplicity. Once when traveling though the smalls towns in the north of Italy, I remember the sensation of impossibility I experienced when I tasted for the first time, a pasta marinara, impossible because it contained only five ingredients and was the best tasting pasta I had ever eaten. The contents of the meal: pasta, tomato, basil, olive oil, and salt. It was as if some hidden alchemy long forgotten was used to draw all the flavors together into a simple taste-explosion, no fillers needed.

Piada, the small Italian sandwich shop in the Lower East Side contains some of this same alchemical quality. Serving a range of sandwiches, wraps, and salads, this tiny stop is a great place to pick up a healthy and quick meal as you venture to your favorite LES bar, gallery, or vintage clothing store. The shop aims for a sleek modernist feel, white and grey clean lines and minimalist simplicity but ends up more with a flatness that you wish was a bit more welcoming. Yet, the saving grace is the wonderful assortment of 60’s Italian cinema posters that line the wall; a little Fellini (who also inspired the names of the sandwhiches) always adds a little cultured flare to a more sober surrounding.

The shops specialties are its two types of breads:

Piada (or Piadina) “is a very popular Italian flat bread made with wheat and extra virgin olive oil served folder or wrapped. It is a speciality of the Emilia-Romagna region.”

Ciabatta is a traditional Italian bread that is formed into a rounded rectangular shape loaf. Baked with a hard crust, it contains a soft-textured open to dense crumb.”

Give a try to the delicious Giulietta Degli Spiriti a special warm piada made of simple grilled veggies and mozzarella or the La Strada, filled with salame, Pecorino cheese and balsamic vinegar. Both are excellent with the no-filler simplicity of the best Italian food.
What is surprising is the care in detail in which the shop seems to reside, a rare addition to the “fast food” world. On the back of the menu you’ll find a wonderful description of the ingredients many of which are organic. Its feels like a guided tour through the Italian landscape. Here’s a quick look:

Pecorino Toscano Fresh “is a cheese made by sheep’s milk and aged a minimum of 20 days. Pecorino is quite mild and rather creamy though it does have some nutty oak leaf overtones that keep it from being insipid.”

Prosciutto di Parma “is aged 16 months and marks one of the high points of the Italian culinary tradition. It goes far back in time to 2,000 years ago.”
With reasonable prices, speedy service, and quality fare, add this to your stop and go list (and grab one of their oatmeal cookies).