106 Victoria St., Toronto
416-955-0258
$120 for dinner for two with wine, tax and tip
Osteria Ciceri e Tria is a transplanted Neapolitan grandmother's trattoria, minus the grandma. It's owned by Cosimo Mammoliti of the Terroni mini-chain, which has outlets in Toronto and Los Angeles. Epicures who find Terroni too downscale can be forgiven for not knowing that Mammoliti has better in his soul and his résumé: He worked at Noodles and Orso back in the day, so the guy knows quality.
Unabashedly southern Italian (northern Italian is so yesterday), Osteria reminds me of an ordinary (for Italy) eating place in an ordinary town. Its owners have faithfully recreated the rough-hewn stone and wood walls, the exposed pipes, the wooden tables, the open kitchen, even the woman making cheese ravioli from scratch with handmade pasta on the high table just outside the kitchen.
It's all so warm and very cleverly positioned - informal, fairly speedy and cheap enough that two can dine with all fixings for less than $125.
Garlic is this kitchen's best friend. And tomato sauce is its main statement. The menu is small and changes every week, so the apps I checked out may be gone when you get there. But if they have it, put your squeamishness in check and live big:
Try pan-fried Ontario calf brain breaded with citrus zest and herbs. I normally try to avoid eating the brains of sentient creatures, but this brain begs to be consumed. The plethora of lemon zest in the breading gives great zing to the ultracreamy organ meat.
Parmigiana di melanzane, meanwhile, are cute little layer cakes of ungreasy deep-fried eggplant layered with robust tomato sauce and melted scamorza cheese, while verdure stufate - tiny cubes of eggplant, zucchini, red pepper and onion in tomato sauce - is rich and robust, with southern Italy's flavours of the sun.
Crocchette di riso are
light and crispy croquettes made of rice jacked with melted pecorino cheese and small bits of zucchini and guanciale (unsmoked Italian bacon made from salt-cured pork cheek).
And zucchini stuffed with ricotta and pecorino is correctly made with al dente zucchini and competently seasoned cheeses.
Some of the other apps are less exciting. For instance, does the world really need mussels stuffed with tomato-inflected bread? Or tough focaccia with prosciutto? And stracchino with arugula and cherry tomatoes is just too weird, owing to a river of gooey cheese liquid.
The only other significant downer at Osteria is the tasting menu they try to sell you: $15 buys five appetizers, which sounds too good to be true. And it is. You get two bites of each app, which is not enough to make a nodding acquaintance with them, let alone begin to fill the corners of the belly.
Better to order à la carte and get enough to eat. No southern Italian meal is complete without pasta. Pasta ciceri e tria is the house signature, a Pugliese grandmothers' classic: wide handmade pasta, some of which is deep-fried crispy and placed atop more of the same pasta, with the simplest possible sauce made of chickpeas scented with fresh rosemary.
Orecchiette di faro are spelt orecchiette (spelt, for those not in the know, is an uber-healthy grain). I usually find spelt thingies fibrous and grainy. And despite knowing that we all eat too much white flour, I love my pasta and tend to get sullen at the mere threat of having it adulterated by the likes of whole-wheat flour.
This spelt rendition, however, is shockingly pleasant. It is chewier than white-flour pasta, but neither fibrous nor grainy - and is perhaps helped along by the cherry tomato sauce.
Frittatini in brodo, meanwhile, is respectable chicken broth with savoury little shavings of pecorino-scented frittata (kissin' cousin to pasta) and a few thin shavings of white truffle - fragrant but subtle.
One is tempted to think of the secondi as mains, but - absent a primo of pasta - the secondi are too small to suffice. Gamberoni alla griglia, for example, is one giant shrimp (how many did you expect for $15?) with mussels and cherry tomatoes in one of those painfully rare big-tasting Italian tomato sauces with enough chili, garlic and basil to catch the attention of even the most jaded gastronome.
Involtini di filetto is one small roll. Who ever makes involtini any more? It's a blast from the past, like a candle in a Chianti bottle. Involtini are meat roll-ups - veal, beef or pork rolled round a filling and braised. This particular involtino is fairly tender pork tenderloin wrapped around sautéed dandelion greens studded with almond chunks and then itself wrapped in guanciale and braised. Where else can carnivores get such a sophisticated meat hit for $15?
The mains do not come with any vegetable or starch, which makes that initially very cheap dinner merely economical. But let them do the greens for you. Whether it's spinach or rapini is irrelevant. The kitchen's approach to greens stands on a sauté of Apulia's twin pillars: significant quantities of garlic and decent olive oil.
Aside from upselling the tasting menus, the wait staff is mostly fairly heedless. Both evenings we spend there, no one ever brings bread. And on our second evening, the server insists there's no soup on the menu - even when I point out the frittatini in brodo on the menu. She forgets to bring my companion's main course and has no recollection of who ordered what when things come to table. Some nights, your glass of wine comes in a little terra-cotta pitcher, some nights it doesn't.
But despite ho-hum service, Osteria has jumping vitality and enough brio to channel the cuisine of the sun.
Go to the restroom and
listen to the piped-in Italian
vocabulary lesson, click your heels three times and, who knows, you might be in Apulia.