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Cheap Eats
Saturday, May 1st, 2004
Food and Drink
Joanne KatesItalian food, full of love and fancy-free
The funky little restaurant space on Lansdowne just south of St. Clair has been dear to me for 20 years. I can't remember how many plates of tortellini alla panna I scarfed there, but Venezia, as it was called, sold delicious traditional Italian-Canadian food. Nothing fancy, no fresh grilled fish flown in yesterday from the Adriatic.
The owner died and his wife, lacking the heart to continue without him, rented the space to Carmine Accogli, who has a heart bigger than his capacious belly. Does Carmine whine because his wife, Barbara (who is from Rome, hence the Roman pictures on the walls), had a baby in February and instead of being home with his new family he's sweating buckets at the restaurant six days a week from morning till night?
No. He comes out of the kitchen to meet every guest with brio. The guy is chef, and dishwasher too. He's alone in the tiny kitchen doing great credit to the classics of the Italian-Canadian tradition (which by the way, along with Cantonese cooking was the first food with taste that most folks in Toronto met.)
This guy goes the extra mile everytime. Instead of bread, he send out warm focaccia topped with sun-dried tomatoes. Gild the lily with the oil and balsamic that's on the table. They also drizzle nicely on the house antipasto, composed of good Italian salami, sweet prosciutto wrapped round bocconcini cheese, fine wrinkly black olives, good-quality bottled marinated artichokes, carefully roasted red peppers and two aged cheeses (Crotonese from Calabria and Friulani from the north of Italy).
Bruschetta mista comes topped with the usual tomato business, those sweet roasted peppers, olive paste and pesto. Squid are properly grilled and drizzled with clever semi-sweet balsamic vinegar. Mussels are nicely steamed with white wine, garlic and tomato. None of yer newfangled fusion lemongrass for this guy.
Tomato sauce, which the champions of Cal/Ital have discarded as boring, is one of the great moments of a kitchen - when it sings. Which it usually doesn't. The late Freddy Lo Cicero, a great cook, made the best Italian--Canadian tomato sauce I ever ate; his secret was heat and garlic. 1) Get the pan very hot. 2) Add olive oil and let it get hot. 3) Saute a lot of garlic briefly. 4) Add tomatoes. 5) Simmer briefly. 6) Eat, overwhelmed by the scent of roasted garlic.
This approach has a new home in Carmine's kitchen. Hence the appeal of his spagetti amatriciana with bacon (cheap bacon, no thrill) in that zingy tomato sauce.
He also does credit to fresh small clams cooked with garlic, white wine and parsley and served, in classic Venetian style, with linguine. Add crisp ungreasy roasted potatoes with rosemary, and you've got dinner for under $50 for two. Fancy food this is not, to go with the Formica tables and the coat hooks on the walls.
Carmine can't keep all the balls in the air at once, so one evening our pizza main course arrives 15 minutes after the osso buco. But avoid that anyway, because Carmine can't afford expensive veal, so the meat is sinewy and tough under the spendid tomato sauce studded with carrots and onions.
He does lovely crisp pizza with impeccable toppings. Eat his cheap stuff and avoid also the desserts. Carmine's wife parents own a bakery in northern Scarborough so we the desserts are baked with love, but they're bland tasting.
When the server brings over a bottle of Limoncello (the sweet tangy lemon liqueur made in the Naples area) and pours everyone a generous shot on the house, just because, who needs cheesecake anyway?
