Oakland spot earns the love
It is almost inconceivable in the quickly changing dining scene for a chef to stay at a restaurant for more than three years, much less nine.
But Jonathan Luce has been guiding Bellanico in Oakland since 2008, cementing the restaurant’s place as one of the most popular neighborhood gathering places in the Glenview neighborhood.
He’s a chef who’s mastered all the basics: making his own charcuterie, pasta, bread and dessert, which always includes a half dozen choices, such as brown butter and almond cake with butterscotch ($6/$9). Yet there’s another great incentive to visit the restaurant: Each week he crafts a four-course $40 menu with two choices in each category.
Bellanico is the sister restaurant to Aperto on Potrero Hill, which is closing Sunday, April 30, after nearly 25 years. The Oakland outpost has the added benefit of serving as a wine bar so diners can get more than two dozen wines by the glass, and six flights. Diners who choose the wine pairing ($18) get careful verbal descriptions of what they are drinking. It’s clear the staff knows the menu and wine list and presents them in a cordial manner.
The fixed-price menu recently started with either cicchetti, flavor-packed morsels that included two leaves of red endive with horseradish crème and a fillet of smoked steelhead; or Swiss chard malfattini with brown butter and sage. Both were excellent.
The first course on our visit was a cool salad of farro with radicchio, chunks of blood orange, Castelvetrano olives, almonds and a wellrounded Chardonnay vinaigrette. The other choice: a slightly too dense celery root sformato that when cut oozes egg yolk. It’s served with prosciutto-wrapped asparagus and a piquant salsa verde made of peppercress.
Beet and ricotta ravioli, one of the signature dishes, stars in the second course and goes up against a fillet of roasted steelhead with cauliflower, radishes, a few chickpeas and a thick swipe of chile paste.
Dessert was a choice of affogato with a choice of ice cream, or a cheese offering.
While this is an effortless way to go, especially since the pairings are good, I found the a la carte options more interesting, including an exceptional pasta made of cocoa casarecce ($13/$18), where the thick, twisted pasta is infused with a slight bitterness that cuts the richness of the milkbraised pork shoulder.
The antipasti include a generous salad ($10) with arugula, pea tendrils, shaved fennel and chunks of orange with grana padano cheese and Riesling vinaigrette.
The half-dozen main courses include a vegetarian risotto ($20); duck breast with confit leg ($29), baby artichokes and cannellini beans; and braised beef pot roast ($25) with a thin snowfall of grated horseradish and a mix of roasted Brussels sprouts, turnips and cipollini onions nested on an island of polenta surrounded by braising liquid.
It’s a menu that is familiar, but never boring.
The restaurant looks like it has served thousands of diners, with a well-worn interior dominated by a long large bar with tables wrapping around the counter, and a tentlike dining patio out front.
The drab drapes with matching scalloped valances at the storefront windows look like they came from “The Addams Family” set, or maybe just an eccentric aunt, which some regulars might find as endearing as the comforting food.