Lamb and black truffle sausage: Osteria Papavero, you crazy bastard, I love you

One of the appetizers at Osteria Papavero is “antipasti di tartufo” — three dishes with black truffle, subject to chef’s whim and different every night.  Truffle is one of those ingredients that I know is distinguished and I know is expensive but which has never really revealed its charms to me.  Papavero is helping me out with that problem.   I think I’m going to go ahead and order this dish every time I go, because it’s consistently the highlight of the meal.

Tuesday night, one of the plates was a truffled lamb sausage. Long, dark brown, a little pocked, served in a loose coil, looking a little disturbingly like — well, I’ll bet you can guess what it looked a little disturbingly like.  But it was superb:  coarsely ground, a little gamy or smoky, and rich as hell, without being, you know, stupidly rich.  One of the best things I’ve eaten in Madison.

Papavero has a Christmas tree with comic photos of the staff in place of ornaments.  Also a Xerox of the greatest New Yorker cartoon of all time:

Image courtesy of a post by Daniel Radosh, who observes that the caption is not identical with the one that originally ran in the magazine.  But this version is the one I know and admire.

Why aren’t you eating at Osteria Papavero?

Well? Why?

Osteria Papavero is a relatively new downtown Italian. Small friendly room, small reliable menu. A ladder with some vines slung over it gives the place a rustic feel, and at the moment there’s an agreeably modest Christmas tree in the corner. The other night, Mrs. Q and I started with ribolitta (not on the menu, but the place is quite accommodating to vegetarians who want more choices than the menu offers) and a plate of Italian cheeses, highlighted by Ubriaco — a spicy tongue-warming tannic kind of cheese, new to me, that spends most of its life drenched in wine, and tastes like it. Mrs. Q ordered tagliatini in black truffle sauce and I had a kind of elongated orrechiette whose name I forget, in a sausage and mushroom ragout. Both completely conventional and no less satisfying for that. You need places like this in town, places that do everything within tradition and with no mistakes. Ideally in a small friendly room. The French version of this is Sardine (except Sardine is in a big friendly room.) Oh, and Papavero isn’t very expensive; $60 for the two of us with coffee and dessert but no wine.

But I’m pretty sure you’re not eating there! Because it’s been mostly empty whenever we’ve gone.

Other remarks:

• A kind of trademark is fried bread in the breadbasket; salty and oily, it’s both delicious and the kind of thing you wouldn’t be shocked to be served at the state fair, which makes it a funny thing to be eating at a restaurant like this.
• The dessert was maybe the only challenging thing we ate: a very good chocolate tart which was interesting by virtue of not being very sweet.
• Our neighbor, a postdoc visiting from Italy, says Papavero is the only Italian restaurant in town that’s Italian.
• We brought a friend with celiac here once, and the chef was a perfect angel about preparing food that wouldn’t sicken her.