By Michael Minorgan for Curtains up
www.globalgourmets.ca michael@globalgourmets.ca
After a recent night out watching a somewhat uninspired and run of the mill horror movie, The Conjuring, I had a craving for a good bowl of pasta. So off we went to St Denis St and Artigiani Ristorante Pizzeria. Before getting any further into my critique I should confess that I was using a coupon from Living Social that specified set choices for our Dinner for Two.
My love of Italian cuisine goes back a long way to my several visits to that country and my appreciation for the simplicity of its cooking and the absolute adherence to fresh and quality ingredients.
The ambiance in Ristorante Artigiani is very warm and inviting with exposed brick walls and warm maple hued tables and chairs and a long matching sit up bar on one side of the room. We sat on the terrasse enjoying the passing parade of people on this balmy night on always buzzing St Denis Street.
The menu at Risoranti Artigiani offers a good selection of appetizers and salads with the main dishes being principally centered on a good selection of pastas and wood fired pizzas. Our coupon allowed us one choice from the appetizers or salads and one from either the pastas or the pizzas with a grappa, that potent beverage made from the grape slurry in the bottom of the brandy barrels, to finish off our meal.
I don’t know if our waitress had had a hard night and had served more coupon bearers than she wanted, but she didn’t seem overly pleased to take on another. After a rather perfunctory explanation of the choices we were allowed she abruptly left us.
I chose the Arancini a la Romana ($8) as a starter, these delicious fried rice balls are filled with Arborio rice and a variety of other optional fillings including, among the possibilities; meat ragu, fresh peas and mozzerella cheese. They are then breaded, deep fried and either served by themselves as finger food or with an accompanying tomato sauce. When executed correctly these arancini (little oranges) are a delightful way to start a meal or to serve at a cocktail party. The arancini at Artigiani are definitely not the smaller variety they are more like the arancia, the larger orange size. They are done a la Romana meaning they are stuffed only with cheese, which when fried melts unctuously into the rice. The version here was wonderfully delicate and moist with a light crispy textured and completely oil free crust. It was served on a delicious homemade tomato sauce that I quickly mopped up with my crusts of Italian bread. My companion’s choice of Polette di Vittelo ($12) were two large veal meatballs sitting atop the same delicious tomato sauce. These didn’t fare as well. They lacked the texture and moist interior of a good meatball and were missing the that yummy just fried crispy exterior. Instead, they were a rather unappealing greyish color and a bit dense and dry.
For her main course, my companion chose the Spaghetti con Gamberi E Rucola ($19). Let me start by saying that I have a strong personal aversion to those packaged, peeled, precooked and frozen shrimp. No matter how you reheat them they always end up tasting like rubber to me. Fresh shrimp, I know, are hard to come by in this city and when they are available their price is usually too high to be accommodated on most menus in the city. There are, however, fresh frozen shrimp and it only takes a little time and effort to peel them and cook them to order. Unfortunately her spaghetti was over cooked beyond the al dente stage and the white wine based sauce lacked flavour. My pasta choice of Tagliatelle Ai Funghi Tifolati ($18) didn’t fare much better ingredient wise. The pasta itself was nicely cooked al dente, but the accompanying ‘wild’ mushrooms had long since lost the right to call themselves either fresh or wild. They were all uniformly soggy and greyish in colour lacking the vibrant earthy taste, colour and texture freshly sautéed wild mushrooms should have. Fresh thyme is a very good friend to mushrooms of all kinds, unfortunately the chef here had a heavy hand and it was way too much of a good thing with the taste of thyme dominating everything else.
We accompanied our meal with a nice bottle of Le Rossa Pinot Grigio Tommasi 2011 ($29) chosen from their very reasonably priced and well thought out wine list.
We concluded our meal with a rather pedestrian tiramisu ($8) and barely a sip of the promised grappa! Service was very perfunctory throughout. No one came to check on how we were enjoying our meal and once the initial wine was poured we were left pour the rest on our own.
However, in spite of the hits and misses with the food, my final complaint came when I was presented with bill. I was shocked, that blazoned across my copy of the bill and highlighted in yellow highline ink was an obligatory 15% tip, hand written on the bill. Having been in the restaurant business for many years I know full well that some coupon diners are reluctant to leave a suitable tip, but that is no excuse to resort to such practices. Little did they know, that as a member of the business and left to my own devices, I usually leave a 20% tip!
The cost of our meal, minus the dessert and wine, was included in the coupon so the prices I have shown in his review are those appearing on their a la carte menu.
Artigiani Ristorante Pizzeria
4657 St Denis St
Tel: 514 564-5842
Website: www.artigiani.ca
