Glenwood residents on the Upper West Side, put Osteria Cotta Restaurant and Wine Bar in your pocket for the next time you're up in the 80s, after a day on the Great Lawn, say, or a visit to the Museum of Natural History.

Especially once the weather gets warm (finally!), and you can take advantage of the restaurant's long, open-windowed frontage, not to mention the extensive sidewalk seating. Because although the meals we've had here have never been anything to write home about, there's no denying that the pretty, almost-aggressively convivial bi-level space nicely fills a need for a relaxed, reliable, inexpensive meal, preferably in a group–or on a date–and with plenty of wine.  

 

If the sidewalk tables are full (and they will be, come summer), the downstairs bar/dining area at Cotta makes for a lively, cool-breezy alternative. It's all tall counters and communal tables here–good for scoping out the scene–and the mainstream-indie Pandora soundtrack is loud enough to feel like a night-on-the-town, but not so loud that you have to scream. If you're in the mood for something more intimate, the upstairs dining room is pretty and romantically-lit, and the back room up there has almost a loungey feel. 

 

The atmosphere at Osteria Cotta is solid, but the food, in our experience, is mixed. For example, although everything in the Antipasti section of the Cotta menu sounds pretty appealing, don't be tempted. In our experience they seem to make these dishes (like the "Roasted" Cauliflower, pictured) at some indeterminate number of days in advance, then store them in the fridge. Better to stick with the Cotta pastas, which have received rave-ish reviews from friends, or the pizzas. True, you can get better Naples-style pies at a dozen other places in town (including Fratelli la Bufala on 76th and Broadway), but the Cotta pizza satisfies in its own cheesy, doughy way.