Rocca’s polished gambit felt curiously at odds with the South End’s tastes, not just SoWa’s grittiness. Small plates and bare-bones decor – not tablecloths and loungey sleekness – were becoming the name of the game, and chilled-out spots like Toro, the Butcher Shop, and, later, Myers and Chang and Coppa were happy to oblige. To be sure, Rocca’s whimsical Ligurian fantasia never was as tone-deaf as slick ventures like Sibling Rivalry, Noche, and the now-closed Banq, which seemed like costumed carpetbaggers dropped in from Manhattan or Las Vegas to wow the provinces. Yet one got the uncanny sensation that Sapphire’s Karen Haskell, Michela Larson, and Gary Sullivan had left genteel Rialto in Harvard Square only to remake it in their adopted milieu. What’s more, there was something vaguely theme park about the relentless Liguriana emanating from every crevice, crest, and sea-inspired light sculpture.
Reversing a restaurant curse
GLOBE MAGAZINE
Down the road, Gaslight, which opened four months later, did not dodge the fromage altogether. But it did nail a certain live-from-Oberkampf authenticity that, despite the nightly overdoses of piped-in Piaf, rang true – or at least, not wholly contrived.
Larson points out that her timing – gambling on a big, shiny place in 2007, just as the stock market was about to really sag – was, well, unlucky. “We built a big restaurant there, and I think when the world just went a little wacky, if we could’ve divvied it up in some way and treated it a little bit differently, it would’ve been helpful.”
But for such a big place, Rocca somehow still had an aura of exclusivity. It could feel cliquey and insular, like a standing private gathering – fab for those in the loop but fatal for the poor commuter who’d “snagged” a 7 p.m. date-night reservation on OpenTable at the hot new boite (the one with free parking!), only to be whisked upstairs and deposited into the deafening silence of an empty dining room, as faraway strains of the real party mocked from below. While a 40-seat eatery like Coppa can afford to play the clubby card, Rocca, with more than four times that number, needed if not to court suburbanites, at least to avoid alienating them outright.
During the first six months Rocca was open, I remember having a conversation with a frustrated Larson, who seemed genuinely worried over customer complaints about the house-made pasta: not the quality – there just wasn’t enough on the plate. Authentic primi-sized portioning designed for a three-course meal was certainly a hard sell in Boston, we sighed. Weeks later, though, a new section showed up on the menu. Its header (if memory serves) did not, in fact, read “Troughs of Workaday Dried Pasta for Indelicate Rubes.” It just felt, very distinctly, like it did.