FESTIVE ELEGANCE
Pranzo offers menu, atmosphere worthy of celebration
Pranzo has been around for so long now (it opened in 1988) that we’ve dined there on many, many a special occasion. You can correctly conclude that Pranzo doesn’t disappoint.
For one thing, it’s elegant enough for a special occasion without being overbearingly formal or even remotely ostentatious. For another, it has an extensive enough menu that even the fussiest eater can find something appealing. And some of its signature dishes — and not just Italian versions of macaroni and cheese — rightly qualify as comfort food. Hungry for long-simmered, fall-apart-tender meat? Try the lamb shank. Meatballs? Pranzo’s got those, too, in a savory tomato sauce. Exotica? What about fresh, cheese-stuffed and crisply fried squash blossoms? Or squid, grilled with a little red chile, and a lot of oil and lemon? And I don’t know where else around town to get carpaccio — paper-thin slices of raw beef, garnished with capers and one of my favorite dishes.
On my latest visit to Pranzo, I took a Europhile and formally inclined friend to lunch. She was pleased, and so was I.
To start, we ordered one of the first-course specials, crispy eggplant ($10.95). It was excellent: very lightly breaded and very crisply fried, and served with just a hint of tomato-based sauce and roasted peppers. We gobbled up four slices and fought over the last one.
She chose another special, the salade nicoise ($21.95), as her main course, and it proved to be the star of the meal. It arrived with the requisite trimmings: a couple of tiny Yukon potatoes, nicely boiled, and a smattering of al dente green beans. For salad greens, Pranzo opted for plain arugula, peppery and high-spirited, and perfect with the accompanying pieces de resistance — huge chunks of fresh tuna seared on the outside but bright red in the center. Lovely! My friend ate every scrap on the plate, and I could only look on covetously.
I chose another special, fish and fries ($18.95). It, too, was excellent. Crisp filets of white fish had been lightly battered and crisply fried. (Per the eggplant, Pranzo has its deep-frying technique down pat.) Hidden in the mound of golden rectangles on the plate were also wedges of deep-fried onion, a nice surprise. The fries were standard, but good, and dipping sauces included a caper-y mayonnaise that I particularly liked.
Good as the special was, it was basically fish and chips, and I wondered what it was doing on the menu in an Italian restaurant. Then I realized I might have liked Pranzo’s fritto misto, a deep-fried classic mixing shrimp, calamari and bay scallops, just as much, although the accompanying tomato sauce on the menu had put me off.
Committed as always to three courses, we chose the Italian classic tiramisu and Pranzo’s flourless chocolate cake for dessert ($7.95 each).
Who can resist tiramisu? It’s another Italian comfort food: cake-like ladyfingers soaked in coffee, layered with cream and mascarpone cheese and dusted with chocolate. Pranzo’s version met the standard: It was rousingly coffee-flavored, comfortingly cake-like, suitably soggy and just dusted with bitter chocolate. The only thing missing, as far as I was concerned, was the hint of alcohol, provided traditionally by Marsala and more unconventionally by a compatibly flavored liqueur.
Pranzo’s flourless chocolate cake was a winner, too. As you’d expect, it was dense, soft and well-flavored with bittersweet chocolate. But what grabbed our attention was Pranzo’s unusual pairing of chocolate with lemon mousse as a topping and crème anglaise as an underpinning. Quite nice!
The service at Pranzo’s is everything you’d expect: unobtrusive but anticipatory and consistent from start to finish. Pranzo will certainly remain on our list of places to go for a celebratory meal.