Even if you find the name Low Calzone kittenish, this winsome café, next to a Las Vegas Athletic Club, has good intentions: quick-serve, low-cal meals done with flair and imagination.
Does it achieve its goal? The best answer I can give is yes—at times.
The restaurant belongs to a pair of young professionals, Matthew Horelick and Bradley Rosenberg, who run the business, along with corporate chef Jay Philpot. Décor is basic to a fault. Order from the counter, then grab a table inside, or on a makeshift patio, where seating is at picnic tables set with tablecloths and silk flowers.
The wall info tells you a bit about the food you'll eat here—that fruits and vegetables are fresh-cut; that turkey is used in the lasagna, meatballs and sausage; that brown rice is used rather than white. There is also nutritional information for a few dishes. The restaurant is in the process of having others analyzed, as this is being written.
I'd describe what I ate here as healthy—rather than diet—food. Yes, the broiled salmon (which is Atlantic farm-raised if you don't ask, and the far superior wild Alaskan salmon if you do) is as close to a diet dish as is served here, accompanied as it is by mango salsa, brown rice and a pile of bland steamed vegetables. The dish comes in at approximately 502 calories; not bad. But the dish would be a whole lot better were it seasoned to pep up the blandness.
Ditto the soup of the day, a chicken-vegetable broth that looked pretty, thanks to chunks of white-meat chicken, red tomatoes and yellow squash in the mix. Too bad the soup wasn't seasoned at all. It reminded me of something I ate once in a hospital, even though it looks a whole lot prettier than hospital food.
But when you start indulging yourself a little, the food gets better. I had perfectly good dishes such as a chicken Caesar wrap inside a sun-dried tomato tortilla, and spaghetti with turkey meatballs—but neither could actually be called low-cal. In fact, the Caesar dressing probably has more calories than the other components put together.
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And while the spaghetti, a multigrain Barilla product from Italy, is healthier than pasta made from refined flour, it's hardly low-cal. Of course, you can substitute low-fat Italian or low-fat ranch dressing for the Caesar, and just eat the meatballs, but that kinda defeats the purpose, I'd say.
One of the more interesting starters here is called chicken strips, chicken rolled in oats and spices, then oven baked, not fried, and served with a raspberry ranch dipping sauce that is addictively good. Again, this isn't low-cal, but it's a start.
Then there is hummus, a dip eaten all over the Middle East, a workmanlike version made from garbanzo beans and tahini, a sesame paste. Eat it on salad, and it's a diet dish. Eat it on bread, and you will be wearing it home.
Marinated Italian chicken, six ounces of the stuff with brown rice and a vegetable blend of broccoli, carrots and zucchini, is only 700 calories, well within guidelines from Weight Watchers.
The signature Low Calzone calzone is said to contain only 560 calories. Maybe that's true, but I find the number counterintuitive. The whole-wheat-flour crust crisps nicely in the oven, and the filling—Roma tomato, marinated onion, marinated chicken, and a blend of low-fat ricotta and cottage cheeses—is deceptively rich, the cheese oozing out when you bite in.
The drinks here show imagination. There are generally four low-sugar fruit juices, served with a skewer of frozen fruit in the glass. The desserts aren't bad, either. One is a low-fat cheesecake, and another is a not-so-low-fat brownie. But I'm going to recommend the strawberry parfait, a plastic cup layered with a whipped cream made from yogurt, fresh cream and a sugar substitute, fresh-sliced fruit, and something called Kashi cereal, a healthy version of Rice Krispies, made from oats and other grains.
Low Calzone has potential, and it clearly needs to attract the throngs from the red-hot LVAC next door. But the owners need to be a little more daring. They are right—quick, low-cal meals don't have to be boring. Low Calzone just needs to tweak the formula.