Critic’s Choice: Max, For Earthy, Soul-Satisfying Southern Italian Cooking
A reincarnation of the beloved NYC Italian restaurant is serving an abbondanza experience in Lenox.
THIS RESTAURANT HAS CLOSED.
Sometimes to get dinnertime conversation flowing before the alcoholic drinks start to kick in, I pose this question to my companions: “If you could eat just one cuisine at every meal for the rest of your life, which would you choose?”
I’m surprised how often people twist themselves in knots for an answer because I think it’s a no-brainer: Italian food. Italian cuisine delivers it all – flavors, textures, variety, ingenuity, haute, homey, and so on. If you want to eat beef, fish, chicken, vegetable, lamb, shellfish, or whatever, assuredly there is some Italian preparation that will come close to the supreme culinary expression of that foodstuff. The wine is also fantastic and, crucially, you get pasta and pizza as part of the mix.
That said, if you told me we were going out to dinner and suggested five different kinds of restaurants of more or less equal quality, if one of them was Italian, that place would be the last I’d choose. Obviously, not because I don’t like Italian food, but rather because I cook it well myself. I started by studying Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking and made the best of my time in Brooklyn near the Carroll Gardens neighborhood and its old-school Italian markets. While there are dishes I can’t pull off in a home kitchen (and I don’t do desserts), if I’m charged with turning out a three-course salad/antipasto, pasta, and main dish meal, I deliver the goods. So when I go out to eat Italian food in the Berkshires, I too often repeat in my head, bite by bite: “I can do better than this.” And that’s no fun.
But then I get this assignment to review Lenox’s new Italian restaurant, Max. It opened last winter in the The Whitlock inn on Church Street, taking over a space that used to be Olivia’s. It’s a comfortable space in a former farmhouse and stagecoach stop – a spacious series of connected dining and lounge areas, with tables spaced to give you a fair bit of elbow room, and with a woody sound-absorbing interior the noise level is quieter than at many other local restaurants. The flower-filled patio with a firepit is lovely and great for families with children who might want some space to move around.
But what about the food – how could I ensure that my ego as a cook wouldn’t get in the way of my judgment? To mitigate the possibility of that happening, I chose as my dining companion my soon-to-be 17-year-old son, a worldly young man and piercingly insightful critic in his own right – not so much of food, but of his father. He would set me straight about whether the food at Max is as good as my Italian meals.
Given that he is a burbling teenaged pasta fagioli of hormones, resentments, and confrontationality, I felt assured of two things:
- He would tell me the Italian food at Max was better than mine, even if the chef was secretly sending out plates of Chef Boyardee ravioli straight out of the can.
- He would order the chicken parmigiana.
These inevitabilities would be workarounds for me the reviewer but, as always, the food would speak for itself. And Max has an estimable pedigree – I was surprised to find out that this Max not only shared a name with Max Restaurant in New York City, but the imprimatur of chef/co-owner Luigi Iasilli, as well. The original Max in the East Village was all my foodie friends’ favorite casual Italian restaurant two decades ago, and also a critics’ favorite; in the years since, Iasilli moved to the Hudson Valley and opened Nonne in Chatham in 2020. Although popular, that eatery closed when it lost its lease. With Bridget Cappo, Iasilli opened this Max last winter, although he departed in the spring, leaving Cappo as sole owner.
I write “reincarnation” because Max in Lenox delivers all that that the Max of my memory used to deliver – reasonably-priced, earthy, and satisfying southern Italian cooking served by a convivial waitstaff in a cheerful, unpretentious space. When we visited, I told my son that to get as much of the full experience as possible, we could order in one of two ways – split one of the pastas and then both order a main, or split an appetizer and one of us order a pasta and the other a main.
“Well,” he said, “I’m ordering the chicken parmigiana, and that comes with spaghetti. So do what you want.”
We ordered the calamari appetizer, which arrived fried to perfection and served in an abbondante portion – as were all the other dishes we tried and that I eyeballed as servers carried them past my table. The abundance at Max is not sheer volume and mass you might get in one of the local “family-style” Italian restaurants, but more like that little extra on the plate your grandmother served because she liked you.
Max is also just the kind of place where even those diners with an adventurous palate would do fine to order the chicken parmigiana – the mozzarella is homemade, as is the spaghetti it is served over. And since chicken parmigiana is literally the only food my son orders in Italian restaurants, I was able to ask him how Max’s take on it compared to scores of other versions of the dish he’s eaten. “It’s just about as good as it gets,” he asserted. I liked it, too, and really enjoyed my strozzapreti alla boscaiola, twisted-cord egg pasta and cremini mushrooms in an onion-fennel sausage and cream sauce. It was hearty, satisfying, and not too salty – saltiness is, my experience, a way that lesser Italian kitchens cover up their dishes’ lack of subtlety. At Max, the flavors of my pasta were bold, fresh, earthy, and balanced.
And the abbondanza doesn’t stop with the food – my first glass of wine, a dry white to go with the calamari appetizer, arrived with a pour that would elicit a swoon from any Wine Mommy (and there seemed to be a few of them who have discovered Max). My teenager recently obtained his driver’s license, and so I ordered a second glass with my pasta (a red) to celebrate my obtaining a reliable designated driver. But our server brought out a white, and when I corrected the order, she then brought out a red that wasn’t the Sicilian red I’d wanted.
At that point, Bridget Cappo came out with a bottle of Nero D’Avola, just to make sure I was getting what I asked for. I told her it was, and she dispensed a pour of the delicious red that was similarly generous to my first glass. Noticing that there was a bit left in the bottle, she poured all of it into my glass, a serving that would knock the average Wine Mommy on her keester. “I can do that because I’m the owner,” she said, smiling. “Enjoy.”
And enjoy just about everything about Max we did (the tiramisu for dessert was the only thing I found underwhelming). As we wrapped up our meal, I arrived at the moment of truth – I asked my son if I made Italian food as good as Max’s.
“No,” he answered.
I pressed him – why not?
“Yours just isn’t,” he said.
On a good night, if I’m firing on all cylinders?
“Maaaaaaaaybe,” was his final word.
A victory of sorts. My final judgment – if my food turned out as down-home and satisfying as Max’s, I’d consider it a good day’s work in the kitchen. And certainly – given the total experience at this excellent mid-priced addition to Lenox’s restaurant row – if Max was one of five choices of where to eat, this Italian place would not be the last one I chose. I could eat food like this every day.
Max
16 Church Street, Lenox, MA
Summer hours:
Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 4-9:30 p.m.
Monday, Tuesday. Thursday, 5-9 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday Brunch, 9 a.m.-2 p.m.
Reservations accepted.
