Zagat sent out a helpful post this week about a dozen new popular restaurants and this casual dining place by chef Roberto Donna was one of them. It's located in the old Sutton Place Gourmet on New Mexico Avenue in the same complex as Chef Geoff's and we were able to get a reservation for a bar seat.
The food was quite good. My roast veal with porcini sauce and potato tart was tasty and a nice dish for the price ($19). Andrea's "Del Plin" pasta -- a fresh, short pasta -- stuffed with potato and leeks and topped with a crumbled sausage called cotechino (and butter and parmesan) was outstanding. The pasta was warm and yummy and the sausage very flavorful; it was served in a broth that combined all the flavors. The Caesar salad we split as a starter was plentiful and fresh. Bread was a nice hard crust and the wines -- a Soave and a Barbera -- quite smooth and moderately priced.
The ambiance, however, is not great. The decor is what I would call early Euro trash, made more garish by the bright neon lighting. It looked more like a truck stop in Belgium, or Italy, than a warm and cozy restaurant. A former gourmet foodshop with big plate-glass windows may not be an ideal location for a restaurant. The music when we arrived, somewhat on the early side, could only be described as horrid, a loud rap that might have appealed to the bar crowd over at Chef Geoff's but hardly to the clientele of families and middle-aged couples we saw here. They transitioned later to Christmas crap as the restaurant filled up. A final, niggling complaint -- the parking attendant neglected to observe the validation and failed, as we only realized later, to give us the proper discount on parking.
All that said, the food will certainly bring us back. Prices are on a par with Arucola and the quality is a step or two up.
No comments:
Post a Comment