It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Sunday evening, and I’m in Café Martorano, the often stunningly good new Italian restaurant at the Rio. After dinner, I’m going to rush home in order to catch The Sopranos. But if I linger, I’m told, I might actually see Tony Sirico, the actor who plays one of the Soprano family lieutenants, Paulie Walnuts, on the show. Sirico, along with other actors from the show, comes here often when he’s in town.
Shrimp scampi and a cannoli
TV wise guys notwithstanding, this place attracts people who look like real ones, as well as lovers of East Coast-style Italian food. The early crowd, usually a sedate group of middle-aged East Coast natives—such as your faithful reporter—likes to come here before it gets too noisy, generally by 9 p.m. The late crowd, young, boisterous and actually able to finish the restaurant’s gargantuan portions, files in like clockwork after then.
The recipes belong to owner Steven “don’t call me a chef” Martorano. “I’m just a cook,” he tells me, as he shows me cans of San Marzano tomatoes, expensive Badia a Coltibuono olive oil and the imported bucatini pasta he puts into his dishes.
Martorano, a muscular, tattooed fellow who looks as if he could bone a steer without a knife, is being modest. This spin-off of his successful Fort Lauderdale, Florida, restaurant serves the best food for the genre that I have ever tasted, and that includes places like Chicago’s Gene & Georgetti’s.
The noise level isn’t an accident. Dance floor-size speakers are everywhere, the better to trumpet songs by Tony Bennett and Frank, heard constantly. If that doesn’t float your boat, then eyeball one of the several overhead TV screens. On this night, a movie about the life of John Gotti, starring Armand Assante, is screening.
So I take a seat at my table, draped elegantly in white cloth, and a waiter, clad in black pants and shirt, comes over to sit down with us.
We chat, and crisp Italian white bread is proffered, along with a side dish of extra virgin olive oil spiked with balsamic vinegar and chunks of Parmesan cheese that the waiter is quick to tell us comes from “a $2,000 block of cheese,” the world’s best.
As if that isn’t enough, shaved pecorino and chili oil are provided in another side dish. The waiter seems perplexed when I tell him that pecorino, the Italian word for sheep, is a sheep’s-milk cheese. Now, if I can only get him to be a little less enthusiastic about doing the wine and water pouring. The wine, a $40 Montepulciano d’Abruzzo from Sopranos star Lorraine Bracco, is one of this wine list’s best bargains. But at $7.50 a pop for Panna, an Italian import, I’d prefer tap water.
As you may have guessed, this isn’t an inexpensive restaurant. The entrée list starts at $42, and the veal chop and lobster Francese are both $69. The good news is that you will get your money’s worth. Chicken cutlet and broccoli rabe, a feast on a plate, should serve two, and the components, a perfect cutlet redolent of seasoned bread crumbs, rapini and a terrific risotto laced with peas, simply couldn’t be better.
I could make a meal of appetizers here and never even get to the pastas or main dishes. Our Famous Homemade Meatball, the size of a wet softball, might be the best meatball I have ever tasted, an amalgam of pork, veal, beef and those amazing seasoned crumbs. A South Philly-style fried calamari comes tossed with hot and sweet peppers.
Eggplant stack is ideal for sharing, breaded eggplant cutlets layered with top-quality fresh mozzarella, vine tomatoes, arugula and balsamic vinegar. A dozen baked clams are topped with bread crumbs and lots of garlic. There is even an authentic Philly cheesesteak on a crisp Italian roll. It’s a real gut bomb, all right, but just try to stop eating one.
One of my friends gasped when he saw plain spaghetti with fresh basil and garlic on the menu at $25, but he’s a convert now. Seafood Fra Diavolo, at market price, has the cream of the ocean: giant prawns, fresh scallops, clams, calamari and whatever the chef—make that cook—has around. Me, I’m coming back for rigatoni with Sunday gravy, loaded with a pound or so of tender pork and topped with fresh ricotta.
You can sit at the six-stool counter and watch the kitchen staff riff, and if you are lucky, someone will send you out a dish or two. Pizza isn’t on the menu, for example, but magically appears, gratis, on your table from time to time. And desserts are delicious. The cannoli, those canoe-shaped pastries filled with sweet ricotta cheese laced with dried fruit and chocolate, are incomparable, and sometimes, there is a terrific chocolate cake served with vanilla ice cream. Is it flourless, I hear you ask? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Café Martorano
Inside the Rio. 777-7777.
Dinner only, 6 p.m.-midnight, occasionally 1 a.m. Suggested dishes: meatball, $20; baked clams, $18; rigatoni, $38; chicken cutlet with broccoli rabe, $42.