After several months of mourning the loss of It’s Italian Market on East 7th Street, my husband and I finally got to celebrate the opening of It’s Italian Cucina on South Lamar. At the old location on East 7th, the gregarious chef, Al Fini, was a huge draw for his popular Italian wine happy hours. Now, we get to enjoy Al’s company and cooking in a much bigger, full service restaurant with an Italian rustic chic feel. I couldn’t help but get there for their first lunch service, and since my husband got super jealous, we had to go back for dinner!
The menu is mostly Northern Italian (specifically Piemontese) cuisine focused with a small, rotating section that will feature dishes from other regions in Italy (during this visit it was Calabria). Lunch offerings range from soups and salads, to pasta and pannini. The dinner menu is extensive with multiple antipasto options, soups and salads, pastas, mains, contorni, cheese, charcuterie and desserts. Cocktails, Italian craft beers and an extensive all Italian wine list round out the menu.
I don’t know about you, but I love a hot bath, and Al’s got us covered with his bagna cauda. Bagna cauda is a typical Piemontese dish which literally translates to “hot bath”. Al told me it translated to “garlic bath” which I thought was even better. Whole cloves of garlic are immersed in oil and anchovy paste and heated until a salty, garlicky dip forms. Crudité and Italian bread help to get every last tasty bit to your mouth.
Both my lunch companion and later my husband had the pasta Bolognese as their main. Perfectly al dente pasta was dressed with just the right amount of meat sauce and topped with thick shavings of Parmesan. My salsiccie (sausage grilled with onions and peppers) took me straight back to my grandmother’s house in Pittsburgh where she would prepare this dish regularly. Hers usually included a red sauce as her recipes came mostly from Southern Italy, whereas Al’s was simply prepared and delicious with the vegetables done just right alongside a perfectly seasoned and grilled sausage.
Our evening meal began with a big plate of prosciutto di Parma drizzled in just the right amount of balsamic vinegar and herbs. We also sampled the Asparagi di Basssano, a specialty dish of fat white asparagus spears cooked in white wine and dressed with chopped hard boiled egg and oil. The asparagus itself is protected in Italy under PDO laws which regulate the quality and production of both wine and traditional foods in Europe. This dish along with the Rucola salad served as my relatively healthy and also delicious main course for my dinner. So, of course, I had to offset the healthy choices with a cheese plate that we were obligated to pair with a Recioto della Valipollicella for dessert. This wine is produced from Corvina grapes that are dried on straw mats for several months prior to fermentation resulting in concentrated sugars that provide a lovely but not overpowering sweetness to the final product.
The wine list is wide ranging in its offerings and thankfully Italy can satisfy almost any preference these days. Sparkling wines, familiar Pinot Grigios, aromatic whites, and Piedmontese whites are easy to pair with starters and fish dishes. The red list ranges from typical Italian grapes such as Sangiovese, Nebbiolo, Barbera and the Corvina that produces Valpolicella to varietals newer to Italy but familiar to most. They offer wines by the glass, half bottle, bottle and selected flights. Al, an Italian wine expert, is a wonderful resource to guide your pairings and help assuage your fears about Italian wines (there are 400+ grape varieties grown in Italy!).
We’ve got many more things to try on Al’s menu so we will be back for the food, the friendly staff and the wine. Join us soon, you may find me doing a weekly tasting there in the near future!
