SOME, NOT ALL, OF LE PETIT ITALIEN’S CHARMS RESTORED
Former owner reacquired resto, old name and Christian Bisson on wine, but has the new crew recaptured former glory?
There is a certain kind of restaurant that almost inevitably thrives because it checks off so many boxes. Mid-priced? Check. Terrasse? Check. Neighbourhood place? Check. Terrific location? Check. And finally, I’d say, casual French bistro or classic Italian? Check and check. The chances for success rise with every such asset. If you have two or more, you basically have it made. If you have them all, you should have it made in the shade.
Outremont’s Le Petit Italien is a restaurant with serious box-checking potential. It’s not expensive, and its location — complete with a sidewalk terrasse — is on one of the borough’s most beautiful summer destinations, the lovely Bernard Ave. As for the menu, it’s give-’emwhat-they-want Italian trattoria favourites. Situated in a rather residential part of the city, many customers can simply stroll over for a bowl of spaghetti. It’s a no-brainer, really. It also has an interesting history.
Opened in 1999, with a swanky decor by über restaurant designer Bruno Braën (and later refreshed in 2006 by Zébulon Perron), Le Petit Italien was busy from the get-go. The menu was classic with enough innovative dishes to keep it interesting. The place was cool and service was friendly. In a way, it replaced the once-wonderful Spaghettata on Laurier Ave. where, for decades, Montrealers headed “en couple” or“enfamille”forabowlofpasta or a plate of veal scallopini before closing about 10 years ago.
In 2013, Le Petiti Italien was sold and rechristened Pinokio and, later, Il Bernardino. But just this past March, the restaurant was re-acquired by former owner Alain Starosta, who brought back the old name as well as Christian Bisson (formerly of Mercuri) on wine duty, and Evan Gubersky and Pablo Rojas (of Provisions 1268 and Boucherie Provisions) on food duty. Having visited the restaurant in its Pinokio days, when confusion reigned and half the menu wasn’t available on the night I visited, I was pleased to hear the new crew’s goal was to restore the restaurant to its former glory, because this is exactly the kind of neighbourhood restaurant everyone needs.
And yet, after dinner there last week, the new crew members still appeared to be finding their way. The menu features several of the former restaurant’s greatest hits along with a few newbies and several daily specials, like risotto, fish, meat and crudo. On the first read-through, nothing really grabbed me or seemed all that different from the Italian food many of us serve in our own kitchens. A friend of mine always says, “Why would anyone ever order pasta in a restaurant when you can easily make it at home?” My answer is always that we order pasta in restaurants precisely because we can make it at home but, hopefully, not as well as a professional chef. No doubt, Italian restaurant food these days has to be sharp, yet almost everything I tasted at Le Petit Italien was dull.
To begin the evening, our waiter read the dish descriptions off a notepad without even a hint of enthusiasm. OK, this wasn’t a production of Coriolanus at Stratford and he did let us know it was his first day. But listening to your waiter read off a cheat sheet doesn’t get the evening off to the most scintillating of starts. When a waiter says the risotto of the day is cauliflower and you ask, “cauliflower and what?” and they leave the table to find out, you’ve got to wonder.
We ordered three salads to begin, and when they arrived, I wondered even more. The first, a Caesar with Parmesan crumble and bits of fried pancetta, was doused in vinaigrette and offered a very small portion-to-cost ratio. For that price ($13), I’d expect another two handfuls of romaine. The second salad was a mix of endive, grapefruit, fennel and caramelized pistachios. As much as I like bitter flavours, I’m not sure a salad comprised of only bitter ingredients is such a great idea. As for the look, an effort is required to make these salads more enticing. (The addition of kitchen tongs on each plate didn’t help, either).
The last salad featured a few spears of grilled asparagus with a sort of dry sauce gribiche (made with chopped eggs) along with dabs of a goat cheese cream, croutons, Parmesan curls and pickled onions. Not only did it look like something you’d get in a cooking school dining room, the asparagus spears were pretty banged up and the flavours were incompatible. Why two cheeses? Why the tough croutons? Why the pickled onions? I’m still scratching my head.
For the main courses, we ordered two half-portions of pasta, one full portion, and the aforementioned cauliflower risotto simply because I was curious about this white-onwhite ingredient combo. Turns out, that risotto was the best dish of the night. The texture was soupily perfect, the dish had great flavour (ideally seasoned) and the cauliflower added a fun contrasting texture. Excellent.
As for the pastas, my first complaint is that, like the Caesar salad, they were swimming in sauce. Italians keep the saucing light on their pastas, but in North America we tend to load them on. The puttanesca — the famous dish named for the Neapolitan prostitutes who lured customers to their doors with this pasta’s pungent aromas of garlic, anchovies, olives and capers — was good but lacked the bracing intensity that makes the dish so famous. In this version, the tagliatelle looked like it was first tossed in a tomato sauce and then topped with a ladleful of puttanesca sauce instead of it all being cooked together.
The other two dishes were a basic spaghetti pomodoro and a rigatoni with rapini and sausage that were good but, again, drowning in sauce, which weighed the pastas down. Too bad, but it really wouldn’t take much to find a middle ground to make these dishes sing.
Desserts included a panna cotta with strawberries, a chocolate tart and a mille-crepes cake. Again, the plate presentations were just odd, with crumble, poached pears, ice cream, a zigzag of syrup and some dabs of cream (or was it lemon curd?) on what was otherwise a nice mille-crepes cake. (I’m renaming it the “mille garnishes” cake). The chocolate tart was given the deconstructed treatment by placing pieces of broken pastry overtop a stiff ganache that just looked silly. The panna cotta was the least garnished dessert, but the ripped pieces of mint overtop weren’t doing it any favours.
There were some nice aspects to the evening, like Bisson recommending a wonderful Occhipinti SP68 wine for a reasonable $65 after I turned down the first wine tasted. For a wine that retails for $31 at the SAQ, that’s one sweet deal. And the ambience is buzzy yet not obnoxiously so. But frankly, the food and service need a serious upgrade. For a restaurant with so much going for it, the two main boxes of the experience have yet to be checked.