Cometa
Shanghai
The dishes
Insalata Russa/Potato salad
Vitello tonnato
Supplì al telefono fried Arborio rice balls, tomato, mozzzarella cheese, lemon)
Lemon cacio e pepe homemade fettuccine, pecorino, black pepper, lemon and parsley
Chicken & peperoni
Truffle fries
Easily the most successful and best Italian bistro in Shanghai, the recently opened Cometa boldly goes where most such eateries in the city have not gone before. That is because most Italian restaurants in Shanghai fall in one of two categories (not counting pizzerie): super high-end restaurants such as Da Vittorio and Bombana, and simple, enjoyable trattorie like Da Marco, Palatino, Porto Matto and Senso. But unlike the city’s many super-successful French bistros, the in-between type Italian eatery is completely missing in Shanghai: you have a vertiginous fall from the multi-starred dining establishment to the family-run-type place. All are good and highly enjoyable (really, the Italian food in Shanghai is actually, for the most part, much better than it is in other big cities such as NY and Toronto, where it gets revisited to a fault, losing much of its Italian authenticity, which is always a problem and that’s no matter how good it may turn out to be), but sometimes you are left wishing for something that punches in a middle weight class, offering much better wines than the Shanghai trattorie do and food that won’t force you to mortgage a house in order to have it (the problem, logical and understandable as it is, with Michelin-starred places). Cometa, like the moving star system that it is, has flamed onto the Shanghai food scene with something that was both new and very much needed.
