I HAVE a bone to pick with Madonna. With Tom Hanks and Danny DeVito as well. All three have vouched unreservedly for the restaurant Da Silvano, filling its guest book with pithy testimonials, which also made their way into a Da Silvano cookbook.  Bravo! proclaimed Mr. Hanks. (His exclamation point, not mine.) Bellissimo! raved Mr. DeVito. (Again, his exclamation point.) Madonna, in a less exclamatory mood, said, Yummy yummy. Shes always been such an eloquent lyricist.  Celebrities love Da Silvano. Many regular folks love Da Silvano. Even some self-regarding gastronomes whose opinions I respect love Da Silvano, and I have to wonder if any of them has had anything like the chicken liver crostini I sampled on the first of several recent visits. They tasted like pet food  or, rather, how I imagine it would taste.  On that same night I was assaulted by the osso buco, at once overcooked and over-flabby, with nightmarishly liquefied marrow. While the excavation of marrow always calls for a narrow instrument, that instrument shouldnt have to be a straw.  What were Tom, Danny and Madge thinking, or eating? And why was this restaurant so packed?  Those questions tugged me back to Da Silvano, and my return visits did indeed yield answers, by which I mean dishes that crossed the yummy threshold and even, in some cases, made me want to exclaim.  A revelation! Thats an honest description of the plump rabbit, uncommonly tender and perfumed with rosemary, that I had there.  Just like in Italy! Thats a fair tribute to the buffalo milk mozzarella, among the best in the city. It had a dead-on degree of the oxymoronic sweet sourness that this cheese is all about. It was texturally weepy in the right way  a little, not a lot. And if you order it with Da Silvanos exemplary prosciutto and make bites that combine a bit of each, you yourself might be moved to tears.  Perhaps more than any New York restaurant I know, Da Silvano illustrates the occasional futility of summary judgments, the mind-boggling inconsistency that can exist across the breadth of a menu and a series of visits. Although those of us in the criticism business like to talk in sweeping, definitive terms, many establishments resist such reduction.  In particular, many establishments like Da Silvano do. The context of my visits was a mini-survey of Italian restaurants that are neither proudly hokey red-sauce joints nor stylized, self-conscious destinations. I was curious about long-running restaurants that combined classicism or rusticity with lofty prices and currency on Page Six.  I went to Il Mulino, where half the food was fantastic, half not. To Il Cantinori  so pleasant in some ways, so forgettable in others.  Da Silvano had the craziest full-throttle energy (just try to have a whispery conversation there) and the oddest service, which could truly be called familial, inasmuch as it was equal parts loving and forgetful, teasing and chiding.  This is disgusting, said a server one night as he swooped in to sweep away all the crumbs Id created by going bonkers with the nicely salty and crunchy foccacia.  I apologized for being and leaving such a mess.  Its not your fault, he said. Its the breads.  Da Silvano, which received two stars in The New York Times from Ruth Reichl in 1998, has been around for more than three decades. Over that time it has evolved from a trailblazing showcase for unadorned Tuscan cooking to something of a downtown Elaines, with a proprietor, Silvano Marchetto, practiced at coddling stars and manufacturing his own luster. A cartoon illustration of his face is stamped on the restaurants water bottles and pepper grinders.  The look of the restaurant never changes all that much. With the rough-surfaced yellow walls in some rooms, the exposed brick in others and the romantic lighting, you can easily imagine yourself in some far-away trattoria.  Of course, youre on a busy stretch of lower Sixth Avenue, but the sidewalk outside Da Silvano is broad enough to permit many appealing outdoor tables that arent awash in exhaust fumes. And to my surprise, the servers seemed relatively egalitarian in distributing those tables.
So just what is Da Silvano? A serious restaurant of simple pleasures, or an atmospheric, adrenaline-charged mill for expensive bistecca alla Fiorentina?