REV UP YOUR APPETITE
Autostrada serves up lovely fare
In Italy, you can be lost on a highway, stop at a gas station and find expertly made cappuccino and a sandwich. The Autostrade, the country’s road arteries, are conduits to serendipitous eating and drinking.
That’s the idea behind Autostrada, on Main Street, run by Lucas Syme and partner Dustin Dockendorf. Enter and a roadster roars to life. I exaggerate. It’s a quirky mural of a running shoe with wheels, begoggled driver and an ice cream cone logo at the toe.
“We both enjoy cars and both did numbers of trips on the Autostrade,” says Syme, who also operates Cinara, the West Pender charmer that radiates Italian goodness. His brother created the mural, gilded with gold, silver and copper leafing.
Autostrada (singular form of Autostrade) is on the ground floor of a new condo development along with a third Matchstick coffee shop (Main Street, rejoice!). The welcome factor is palpable when an owner is in the house and Dockendorf (previously head of “concepts” at Joey’s) is often there, enthused.
It’s a busy, buzzy place and acoustics were surprisingly OK considering the small space and hard surfaces. I earnestly tried not to hear a neighbouring conversation, but leaned in as one of them said, “Do you know what Mick Jagger said about Jerry Hall?”, then dropped to an inaudible whisper.
Autostrada is more osteria than ristorante and the focus is on pastas and starters. The pastas, I was surprised, are made with dry, not fresh, noodles. Not yet, anyway. Syme is moving toward house-made, but inadequate staffing, the bane of Vancouver restaurants, burdens the kitchen.
“We’re using Rusticella (a top Italian brand),” says Syme of the pastas. “We’ve recently done fresh agnolotti and in a month or two, we’ll bring on more fresh pastas. Finding staff is tricky.”
Space is a challenge, too. What you see in the front is the kitchen except for a fridge and dishwasher in the back.
That said, I loved my dry pasta linguine with clams, mussels and a white-wine tomato sauce ($21). The seafood was pristine and the sauce added the fresh zing. Sagne a pizza ( broken lasagna-noodle pieces, $21) with duck and anchovy ragu looked totally appealing with shaved Parmigiano and a generous amount of ground duck meat, but both duck and anchovy were shy on flavour.
Not so the Frutti di Mare ($15), a dazzling assemblage of local tuna, side-stripe shrimp, mussels, clams, with crisp contrasts of endive and radish, all drizzled with preserved lemon dressing. Sottoceti (pickles) and ricotta on toast was satisfying, but for me, the sharp acid overwhelmed the dish.
Desserts kept with the keep-itsimple Italian approach. A rice pudding didn’t do it for me, but I liked a brandy chocolate tart enough to hunt down the recipe from the oft-hailed Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. Simple and simply delicious.
The concise wine list goes off road. Italian wines are simply described, but not named: richy, sultry Venetian; almost super Tuscan; fresh, juicy rose; graceful Chardonnay and so on.
Wine geeks can refer to the bottles displayed at the front, in the same order as listed on the menu for more precise ordering.
“This is a fun, casual place with fast service,” explains Syme, “but the wines punch above (their) weight, are good value and interesting. It’s hard for small restaurants with limited cellaring ability to have consistent access to wines. One week it’s there (at the B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch) and the next, it’s not.”
My only beef is the dry pasta. It’s fine and the kitchen puts out a fantastic quality of fresh and topquality ingredients (they work with eight well-researched Italian olive oils) and there’s a lot of love in the food, but nothing beats well-made fresh pasta and from this calibre of chef — I want it.