Stella Pasta Bar not hitting on all cylinders
Newest spot at Van Dyck hits with beer, ambiance; misses with service, dishes
It’s not hard to feel nostalgic about The Van Dyck in Schenectady’s historic Stockade District. Walk the row of brick buildings on Union Street and you could be in another time; reach the awning, and you can imagine the sounds of jazz that used to flow since its founding by Marvin Friedman in 1947. In truth, who wouldn’t feel excited at The Van Dyck’s fourth incarnation? As a new home for Stella Pasta Bar & Bistro, a pasta eatery operated by Chris Sule and Lisa and John Reilly inside Burnt Hills’ Fo’ Castle Farm Country Store since 2016, and a rebranding of Mad Jack Brewing as Seven Points Brewery, the venerable venue has a chance to live on.
Read any history of The Van Dyck original and you quickly pick up its reputation as a venue for legendary jazz players, later expanded by Friedman’s nephew to include R&B, soul and pop artists. But a series of bankruptcies and ups and downs peppered the venue in the hands of its three subsequent owners, though collectively they kept The Van Dyck alive. By last spring, The Van Dyck had closed, and Stella Pasta Bar was hunting for a new home. In the heyday as a white-cloth formal dining, The Van Dyck was the place to be seen, later switching to more casual pub food. Now, as Stella and Seven Points Brewery, it’s a great spot for beer, but with gummy pasta and aggressively sweet sauces, the restaurant struggles to hit the mark.
And that’s strange for a pasta bar. There’s enough demand for scratch-made pasta that I’m asked about it all the time, whether hand-pulled Lanzhou noodles or flavorful Italian. And Stella’s new space has a warmth and comfortability that matches its past, with a towering fireplace in the dining room, dark wood paneling and a mezzanine overlook where salons were held. It attracts a casual crowd, some
birthdays, many couples on date night, a stream of pints poured at the bar.
In spite of having made reservations, the front-of-house staff seems flustered by a slow-turning dining room. We, and other parties with 7 p.m. reservations, are directed to the bar, where my disappointingly flat and watery rosemary gin fizz dilutes any interest in a “Hand-Crafted Cocktails” list made up of the collegefriendly cran-vodka, screwdriver and peach Bay Breeze. All that’s missing is a Fuzzy Navel and Slippery Nipple. In a brewery, it makes sense to try the beer — a smart move when I taste the orange peel bitter notes in the German-inspired Mandarin Kolsch and cinnamon-brown sugar warmth of an amber Christmas Ale.
We spot a New York strip steak special sailing out to a half-dozen tables. Mine arrives tender and rare, blanketed in brandy-peppercorn sauce with snappy roasted asparagus stems and Parmesancrusted potatoes roasted to salty umami bombs. If steak feels like an honest meal on a cold night, the intense sweetness of
the sauce undoes the good work and is best scraped off so the flavor of the steak can shine. At $32, no one should have to strip their steak.
Much of the appetizer menu works as bar snacks — arancini (Italian rice balls), steamed clams or zucchini fries sliced in great lengths, breaded and fried. Ricotta fritters magically shaped into crisp clouds are fried to a perfect shell, innards softly warmed like deep-fried ice cream and served with their excellent house marinara. They’d be better without the dousing of balsamic glaze. The impressive curves of a lump crabcake trio are matted with dough and seriously spicy — too much for my guest — even before the squiggle of sriracha mayo.
Though there are service touches like a choice of butter or Saratoga Olive Oil with our slightly underbaked Italian white bread, we marvel at dining room theater like plates delivered to the wrong table and the wrong plates delivered to us, to the point that servers seem too many, overlapping in tasks on the floor. (I was
momentarily reminded of the first restaurant manager I worked for, who coordinated his waitstaff like a soccer team, subbing in players and calling out efficient plays from the sideline of the floor.)
Our server recommends the mushroom ravioli, four floppy large parcels filled with cheese and portobello, porcini and shiitake mushrooms. It arrives in a onenote, overly sweet sherry Alfredo that matches the deep beige of the dough. The savory mushroom filling is delicious, but the very first bite is sticky, the gumminess of the pasta taking fast hold of my teeth like denture cement. I had been excited enough about the homemade lemonpoppy seed pasta with chicken to order it as an afterthought, in spite of no option for a half portion. Long bumpy extruder strands are al dente but smothered in a saffron cream sauce with a sweet and stale pungency that clashes bitterly with the lemon, and a few dry, tough chicken strips languish on top. Honestly, the lemonpoppy seed pasta might be excellent with a knob of butter and little else, but that sauce needs to go back into R&D, stat.
Presented with a dessert chalkboard, we learn desserts are all made in-house, from the gluten-free flourless chocolate cake to jumbo cookies (sold out this night), and my guest chooses creme brulee. A single tap on the torched sugar crust sends liquid spurting volcano-like through the cracks, yet a plunged spoon scoops up cream as cold and firm as semifreddo beneath the unset top. I’m content to admire the carpeted room and finish the Alta Vista malbec that I’d ordered with my steak.
Stella isn’t yet where it needs to be. For now, it’s a convenient spot for craft beer with a burger ($16) or tacos ($17), and live music on Saturday nights is the more exciting draw, as well as a precursor for larger plans to open the upper-level Seven Points Lounge for nightly jazz and ticketed shows in 2023. From The Van Dyck’s fine dining in the 1940s to pub fare in the ’90s, food has seemingly played second fiddle to the music. Many will love Seven Points Brewery, and some will be drawn to the well-lit, traditional dining room. But as a destination for pasta, Stella has work to do.