Forging an identity with delightful dishes
"Oh. You don't serve pizza?"
With that remark, the man and his young daughter - who had just strolled into Cafe Italia, apparently craving a slice - turned around and walked back out.
From my own table at the restaurant, where I was having an immensely enjoyable meal of roasted vegetables, baked cod, penne puttanesca, and bread pudding, the brief exchange captured perfectly the struggle ahead for this Mission Hill newcomer.
Is it a pizzeria? No. Is it a sub shop? Not really. Is it a casually elegant, reasonably priced, sit-down Italian restaurant? Yes. But Cafe Italia's identity isn't easy to suss out from the sidewalk, where a handwritten sign sometimes gives the impression that it's a nice destination for a pepperoni pie.
Located in Brigham Circle, the epicenter of the city's medical community, Cafe Italia is owned by Tony Oliviero, who opened Caffe Italia in East Boston in 1983 and Caffe Italia in Marblehead four years ago. He spells his new venture differently - with one F instead of two - to signal that it's conceptually different from its larger, more formal siblings.
Oliviero envisioned Cafe Italia, whose snug dining room has the feel of a cozy grotto, as a quick-food operation that would draw doctors and nurses who work in the area. "With all the hospitals there, we thought our food would knock them dead," he explained, presumably no pun intended.
But the white coats don't seem to have discovered the place yet (it opened in December) and more customers were ordering sit-down dinners than take-out lunches. That wasn't great for business, because many of the people occupying the restaurant's scant 20 seats were eating inexpensive sandwiches, not pricier entrees.
To thwart that, Oliviero created a system in which after 4 p.m. the cheaper foods could be ordered only for take-out, even though a chalkboard menu seemed to indicate the lower-priced items were also available for sit-down dinner. Confused? So were others. So Oliviero recently introduced just one menu that's available all day long.
Cafe Italia may not have captured the neurosurgeon market yet, but that's no reflection on its food. Chef Dario Copia, previously at Rustic Kitchen, makes even the simplest dishes shine. When we ordered roasted vegetables ($8.95), we didn't expect the lovely dish that arrived: a white platter neatly lined with warm sliced eggplant, portobellos, zucchini, summer squash, and peppers, all topped with garlicky diced tomatoes.
Juicy beef-pork meatballs ($8.95) get subtle complexity from ground almonds mixed into the accompanying tomato sauce. An eggplant parmesan sandwich ($6.95) is eggplant at its most pure - barely fried, not drowned in cheese, and paired with plum tomato sauce. I had forgotten eggplant could taste so fine. Penne puttanesca ($9.95) is also artfully made. Any of its ingredients could easily overwhelm - the anchovies too fishy, the black olives and capers too salty - but Copia finds the ideal balance. And his bolognese ($10.95), a meaty beef-pork ragout, is richly satisfying to the last bite.
He does chicken well, too, including a boneless roasted half-bird ($12.95) with a subtly sweet honey-lemon-saffron glaze, and chicken ala samfaina ($12.95) in a ratatouille-like sauce of eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, and peppers brightened with sherry vinegar. Even amid all these stars, one dish is a standout: grilled salmon with black lentils ($14.95), an expertly cooked filet enlivened with lemon juice, oregano, garlic, pancetta, and balsamic vinegar.
I enjoyed my meals so much that I struggle to recall weak spots. Here are two: Baked cod ($14.95) comes in a tomatoey sauce that's too oily for the delicate fish, and the ramekin-sized apple-raisin bread pudding ($5), though delectable, is served refrigerator-cold. Beyond that, Cafe Italia leaves little room for improvement - even if that pizza-hunting father-daughter duo may beg to differ. 