What does an enterprising caterer do when the perfect building turns up, but with a high mortgage tab? If she’s Lynne Turnbull (of L’Ame), she turns the space into a three-night-a-week trattoria, complete with full bar and a seasonally changing menu.Turnbull has had Eileen Thomas, from the original Angel’s on North Main Street in Providence, cooking for her for more than a decade, and the two share a philosophy of getting the freshest local ingredients they can — from Steve Ramos’s greens and Andrade’s daily picked clams to searching for heirloom tomatoes at farmers’ markets and consulting with Mark Gasbarro on the wine list. The shrimp from Florida (instead of Asia) also won me over.
However, be forewarned: Turnbull’s menu changes every two weeks. A few items, such as the Caesar salad and the margarita pizza, stick around. Other items reappear as long as they are available, like littlenecks sautéed in white wine with grilled sweet corn and homemade sausage. Still others are variations on seasonal themes, such as guacamole-stuffed tomatoes (August), morphing to a sliced tomato, red onion, and corn salad (September), to a tomato vodka soup in October. You see the pattern.
Entrées have, since early July, included a pork preparation, a rib-eye offering, two pastas, and the catch of the day — swordfish, tuna, or Atlantic salmon. For a recent dinner with friends, we gravitated toward the Caesar salad ($12) and the “special pizza,” with grilled tuna, white beans, tomato, and rosemary ($16). Bill and I split the salad, and I loved the grilled bread that accompanied the Romaine leaves, lightly dressed and liberally garnished with shaved Parmesan. But we both missed a stronger anchovy taste; perhaps other customers don’t favor it?
The pizza made its rounds with all of us, and I liked the herb, cheese, and tomato lightness of it. But the grilled tuna chunks, so strongly fishy that both of the guys refused to eat them, had either been cooked too long or kept too long.
Moving along to the entreés, I couldn’t resist the shrimp, since I find the Florida-caught ones so flavorful. Rob and I both zeroed in on the red curry shrimp ($26), with Bill choosing the maple/mustard-glazed pork loin chop ($24), and Jan the cavatelli with roasted garden tomato sauce ($14).
The five plump shrimp were served over white basmati rice with a spicy sauce redolent of lemongrass. Around the edges of the bowl were slices of mango and sautéed sweet peppers, yellow and green, with fresh pineapple chutney crowning the middle. The sauce was totally captivating, as were the mango slices, an added plus with the shrimp.
Bill’s dish also had interesting friends on the side: thick sweet potato pancakes and roasted apple chunks. Though there was plenty of glaze to moisten the pork, he would have preferred the meat a bit pinker (perhaps the waitstaff should ask?). Jan found the flavors atop her cavatelli fresh and robust, including not just the tomatoes roasted down to their essence, but some fresh corn and celery as well.
