Disregard that boast, especially if you’ve actually been to Italy. Gio was born there but he clearly is out to please customers and his food is adapted to American tastes and styles. How else to explain a spinach-artichoke dip?
This is no crime. In many ways, the American and the New Orleans variations on Italian cuisines turn out food as good as the land of its roots. That’s true here.
The place looks Italian occupying half a building where quite a few restaurants have come and go, most recently, a Wow Wingery. The other half of the structure is filled by the Saigon Grill, which bundled with the Mona’s next door makes a good little ethnic restaurant row.
The two dining rooms are colorful and quaint. One is the bar, where tables only start filling up once the back room is full. That one’s brighter, warmer and offers a window into the kitchen where you can see real cooking action. Its main advantage, however, is it allows delicious aromas to infiltrate. I love a restaurant fragrant with freshly cooked food. The room is too small, though, and some tables are inconvenient like the one right next to the computer where waitresses punch in orders.
The menu is much different from typical New Orleans Italian fare. Red sauces are a footnote in a collection of dishes more reliant on sauces made with olive oil, wine, lemon juice, fresh herbs, mushrooms and, occasionally, cream.
Start with an order of the bruschetta for the table. Mussels, clams, big shrimp and calamari come out in various rough-edged but delicious tomato sauces; the mussels are particularly good, enough so the sauce becomes a soup after all the shells are gone.
If they served pasta the way they do in Italy, you could get a small plate for the next course. The
chef will do it that way if you ask — he offers to cook anything you want, any way. But order a pasta course, the Alfredo, for example, and you get enough for days, for prices in the low teens.
The platters are all large, and they fill them up. All six entrees on my tables were easily enough fortwo people. But they’re good enough you may blow past the meal-size limit you placed on yourself for your New Year’s resolution.
A good example is chicken Angelo. On one side of the plate reside two chicken breasts sliced
and cooked with about a cup each of artichokes and mushrooms in a lemony sauce of butter
and olive oil. It’s a classic, natural blend of tastes and enough
for as meal.
Pasta fills the other side of the foot-wide plate.
The restaurant is a little hard to find because of road construction. Look for it near the junction of the East Causeway Approach at U.S. Highway 190.• |