Capital Dining (eBook)

ALLEGRO -----------2 1/2 STARS - Italian - $$$ ----------- Today's Italian ristorante is more likely to be a modish room of cutting-edge design than anything resembling the dusky-lit, redcheck-tablecloth, candle-in-a-Chianti eatery of yore. But for all its remodelled interiors, the menu you remember from 1984 is likely the same one you'll get in 2004. For the most part, Italian dining rooms serve the same traditional red-sauced dishes you've always seen, same carrot-broccoli accompaniments, same tomato-basil salad on a January menu as on a September one. Still, for all my grumbling about static, photo-fit menus, my romance with Italian standards-a pungent puttanesca, a fullbodied straciatella, a melting veal saltimbocca-endures. And these standards are well executed at Allegro, a small, handsome dining room of fifteen tables, considerately served. Great soups here: tortelrini, with delicate veal-stuffed pasta pouches submerged in a full-bodied chicken stock, or a fall soup of butternut squash, pretty with swirls of roasted red pepper puree. Carpaccio is carved to order, the meltingly good ruby meat sharpened with strong parmigiano livened with lemon and pepper. A starter of eggplant, thinly sliced, is filled with a blend of ricotta and parmigiano cheeses, baked to just-yielding and doused in a lively tomato sauce. Homemade sausages are well-flavoured, piquant, jazzed up with banana peppers and black olives.The broccoli-carrot ordeal is not part of the Allegro package. Accompanying the veal chop (fat, succulent, only somewhat overgrilled) and the featured trout (impeccable) are roasted potatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, and squash, all faultless. They do agood job with fish here. Sea bass is cooked until the flesh releases the bone and not a second longer, then lightly napped with a wine and parsley sauce, and generously mounted with butter. Allegro's risottos have never let me down. Arborio rice is coddled to toothsome perfection and crowned with seafood: mussels, shrimp, and scallops. Desserts are the standards: tartufo, creme caramel, zabaglione, cheesecake flavoured with some liqueur or other, and tiramisu (of course)-this version fresh, boozy, and strong of strong coffee flavour. There is a regular wine list:-one page, all Italian-and a much bigger vintage selection of mostly Italian bottles. ALLEGRO 422 Preston St. (at Beech) (613)235-7454 www.allegroristorante.ca Access: Steps into restaurant, washrooms are upstairs Price: Pasta, risotto, and main dishes $10.95 to $39.95 Open: Lunch Mon.-Fri., dinner daily AMBER GARDEN -----------TWO STARS - EASTERN/CENTRAL EUROPEAN - $$ ----------- Arrive hungry for an Amber Garden dinner. You will eat weightily on dishes 'dedicated to the culinary traditions of the people on the ancient European Amber Route.' From the whimsically hand-painted wall-size map in the Garden's foyer, you get your first hint that you will eat food deriving from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean. And while it's not particularly subtle or complicated fare, it is absolutely tasty and comforting. You must, of course, have borscht. Amber Garden's version is lighter than you'd expect, but with no shortage of beet flavour. We are happy for the chopped mushrooms within the warm goose liver pate, for the coarse, highly seasoned wedge has a robust livery flavour the 'shrooms manage to ease.