SOLID CHOICE: Caffe Italia has modest prices and a good feel for Italian-American food and culture.
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There are actually two restaurants called Caffe Italia in East Boston: this one, behind the tunnel entrance, between Central and Maverick Squares; and Caffe Italia II, in Jeffries Point, on Bennington Street. The owners have yet another restaurant, in Marblehead, and are also involved in the two Piattini restaurants in Back Bay and the South End. It’s all done with extended family, very modest prices, and a solid feeling for Italian-American food and culture. This particular Caffe Italia, for example, is actually three restaurants with three distinct audiences. You walk into an espresso bar, where a person with the right language skills can find a substantial discussion of Italian Serie A soccer. As such places used to be in the North End, this room is all male.
Through that room is a piano bar, where you can eat lots of good Italian food or just pizza. On weekend nights you’re serenaded by jazz singers and throbbing tenors.
Over to the right, where we ate, is a small dining room with a view into the kitchen. It’s decorated with oversize bottles of wine and imported pottery, and it has much the feel and quality of the smaller family restaurants of the pre-yuppie North End.
Just as I used to have a preliminary test for Mexican restaurants — I’d note the presence or absence of cilantro in the salsa — I do a quick check on the cheese shaker in Italian places: is there a cheese shaker on the table and, if so, how closely does the cheese resemble actual Parmesan? Caffe Italia has not overlooked this detail. It has advanced to hot rolls without butter, so now we check the cruet of extra-virgin olive oil: pretty good.
Real food might start with the soup of the day ($3.95/small bowl; $5.95/large bowl). Our day it was sausage and white bean, not overly thick, and a terrific flavor combination with or without added cheese and pepper.
Calamari salad ($8.95) would be a fine introduction to squid eating for a Midwesterner. It had so many capers, red onions, morsels of kalamata olives, and roasted red peppers that the squid was just a texture. It’s a very appetizing salad. Polenta Italia ($8.95) was fried yellow grits, crisp at the crust and creamy inside, but perhaps a little greasy. I certainly enjoyed every bit of the topping of garlicky, bittersweet broccoli rabe, and the sausage was not hot — as the menu indicated — but sweet with fennel seeds.
The entrée fettuccine Italia ($11.95) has much the same sauce, with the addition of sun-dried tomatoes. (This raises a question: what do Italian shoppers do with the fabulous sun-dried sweet peppers one sometimes finds in the North End groceries?) But I ordered it anyway because the menu specified homemade pasta. And it certainly was homemade, with that wonderful slight chewiness that’s so hard to find outside Italy.
