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No one leaves Baltimore hungry. There are dining opportunities
of every conceivable type, with new venues opening, well, even as you read
this piece.
 LA
TAVOLA Just east of the harbor
is Little Italy, home of almost two dozen culinary spots highlighting Italy's
regional tastes. The newest entry is La Tavola (248 Albemarle
St, 410- 685- 1859). The atmosphere is cool and casual, awash with
bright, airy pastel tones and art with a fun touch. In this setting, you
can relax and let owner Piero Conti escort you through updated versions
of favorites from his homeland. Begin with the terrific, warm-from-the
oven, crusty house bread, which tastes as though it is straight from a
Roman paneficio. Add the insalata caprese, the sweet, which is tender perfection.
Most noteworthy, La Tavola makes its own fresh pastas, cooked in
amazingly delicious ways. Not to be missed is Mafalde all fiorentina, wide
flat noodles married with earthy spinach, ricotta cheese, pine nuts, raisins,
and just a touch of nutmeg. Straightforward, familiar dishes like fettuccine
with Bolognese sauce are comfortingly delicious as well. See to it that
at least one member of your party orders something from the grill. Char-grilled
veal chop, redolent of rosemary, is pure heaven. Sample any of the restaurant's
fresh fish, from swordfish to salmon, done to tender, moist appeal in this
manner. Wines offered are imported and selected by Conti himself, and he'll
be happy to suggest a bottle to best accompany your lunch or dinner selection.
Be sure to save room for a house-made dessert.
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La Tavola
Where: in
Rome
For reservation: via di Torrevecchia, 3/f
Hours: Open Friday, Saturday and
Sunday for lunch (this may change
soon), every day for dinner.
Prices: Appetizers: $5, entrees:
$13-$15; major credit cards.
Call: 06 33.89158
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You've heard the complaints about Italian cuisine. The restaurants are
clones of one another. Everything is drowning in red sauce. Nobody's doing
any original cooking there. It's turned into a tourist trap. It's not the
bargain it used to be. Like most generalizations, they aren't true, except
maybe that last one. But if you have any doubts, try La Tavola, the newest
addition to Rome Typical Italy's restaurant scene. The owner is Sergio Corneli,
late of Washington, where he owned his own restaurant and was a manager
at the highly respected chain restaurant. This is in the same spot where Giovanni opened only a couple of year ago. (Before that it was the Italian Way.)
The change is profound. from a traditional Italy restaurant to
well, read on.
Breaking the mold
Start with the decor, Milan by way of Miami. The entrance is a screaming
yellow, except for the purple door. The ceiling is intensely blue. The
potted palms add a nice tropical touch, and the hydrangeas in galvanized
metal buckets look like something out of a Smith & Hawken catalog.
The windows are draped in gauzy purple stuff. No matter what you think
of the final effect, it doesn't look like any other restaurant in Little
Italy. Or in the world probably. The Menu isn't quite so surprising, although
it's not typical, either. I like the simplicity of the concept: All the
first courses and there are lots of them, cost $5. All the pastas are $11.
Soups and side orders are $4, main courses are divided into two price categories
$13 and $15. La Tavola's specialties are grilled fish and
freshly made pastas, but before we got to those we had three superb first
courses (You'll be sorry if you fill up on the wonderful bread before you
get to them.) The kitchen pairs fresh mozzarella with roasted sweet peppers
instead of the traditional tomatoes. This is a good idea, given what early
spring tomatoes taste like.
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But the combination of peppers and creamy cheese
sprinkled with fresh basil works in its own right. Equally good was insalata
di mare. Tender scallops, mussels, calamari and chunks of shrimp tossed
with vinaigrette and green olives were nestled in a radicchio leaf.
Carpaccio tartufato turned out to be a salad, too. The shavings of raw
beef and Parmesan were bedded on arugula and dressed with vinaigrette:
the flavors and textures mingled beautifully. Each pasta on the menu sounds
better than the last. I finally settled on mafalde alla fiorentina, a potentially
chancy combination that pleased us very much. The broad, curly-edged noodles
were as superior to dried pasta as real mashed potatoes are to instant.
Cooked perfectly, they were tossed with fresh spinach scented with nutmeg,
ricotta that melted into a creamy sauce, pine nuts and raisins. Bravissimo!
La Tavola offers various grilled fish from monkfish to swordfish.
We settled on the marinated salmon with mushrooms and cornmeal. The cornmeal
turned out to be roast potatoes, buy they were good roast potatoes. The
buttery sauted mushrooms (nothing wild or fancy) were a high point of
the evening. But while the salmon steak was beautifully fresh, the much-touted
marinade didn't flavor it as much as you might expect. And the fish would
have been moister if it had been grilled a shorter time. Still the only
dud of the evening was cotoletta all milanese. This was breaded and fried
veal scaloppine, covered with chopped radicchio, red onion and tomato.
It was an interesting idea, but the reality didn't have a great deal of
flavor. On to dessert. The owner claims to have invented decaf tiramisu,
but you can get tiramisu everywhere. Instead have the chocolate "salami,"
thin slices of dried-fruit-and-nut-studded chocolate roll that look exactly
like salami slices. They were prettily arranged with fruit on a pool of
zabaione. Thin slices of pear poached in red wine on more of that creamy
custard made a fine light dessert. Or go for and old favorite, cannoli
with the restaurant's own filling sparked with ground nuts and chocolate. |
 
 
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