| |||||||||||||||
It's always a relief when a shuttered restaurant finds new life. When it opened a few years ago, Verge — the mod restaurant with small plates and fancy cocktails in a retrofitted East Falls insurance company building — signaled big things for a neighborhood colonized mostly by middling bar food and pizza joints. But Verge — ahead of its time, perhaps — came and went quickly, leaving behind vague memories of chocolate oxtail risotto and a faded banner flying forlornly on the back patio. But one restaurant's failure is another's opportunity. Now, two years later, the lights are aglow at this high-visibility location again. The new tenant is Franco Faggi, one of the founding partners of South Street's late Monte Carlo Living Room. Open since early summer, his eponymous trattoria has softened Verge's spare look with caramel walls, romanticized paintings of Tuscan hillsides and the warm light of red glass votives on each table. The patio, overlooking Kelly Drive and the river behind it, is now festooned with an awning, lush, bright plantings and bug-fighting lanterns. A new public lot across the street expands the restaurant's small parking area. One of the best new innovations is house manager Massimo Fazzina, a jovial, round-faced expat from Milan, who, with his firm handshake, natural charm and complimentary slices of bruschetta, makes this newcomer already feel like a institution. Most notably, he conveys gratitude to his customers, recognizing that a neighborhood restaurant should itself be a gracious neighbor. While capitalizing on the building's existing strengths, Franco's also seems to have taken a different tack than its predecessor by keeping the food simple and straightforward, a parade of red-sauced pastas, thin-pounded meats and other South Philly familiars. It's the kind of menu that offers enough variety to keep you coming back, yet enough sameness to be comforting. Portion size is large, and with a number of wines available by the glass in the $6 to $8 range, dinner here is a good value. You'll start with slices of crusty bread and slivers of rosemary-strewn focaccia, both made more memorable by a ramekin of tangy caponata (zucchini, eggplant and tomato stewed into a spreadlike consistency). This sets the tone for a number of first-course winners. Beneath their lacy drizzle of balsamic reduction, grilled scallops are golden-edged and tender, milky white juice spilling into an underlying bed of spinach. A roasted beet salad is a happy confluence of minty-cool and savory-garlic. (The roasted beets also appear in the antipasto platter amid spicy roasted peppers, pepper-speckled slices of sopressata, wedges of aged provolone and bright, fruity cerignola olives.) There's an admirable tagliatelle in a Bolognese sauce, the bits of meat clinging like little beefy barnacles to pasta that is not homemade but nonetheless very fresh. Rosy circles of beef carpaccio with lemony dressing and capers make for refreshing carnivorous bites of summer. On a recent night, an appetizer special was a single roasted orange bell pepper — a cornucopia bursting with rich saffron risotto studded with tiny chunks of zucchini. At times, however, the food errs on the side of shyness. A puff pastry "basket" overflows with sautéed mushrooms fringed with thyme and chopped tomatoes, a mixture that might benefit from more seasoning. The shrimp and cannellini bean appetizer offered a generous portion of jumbo shrimp, but the beans themselves, though wonderfully creamy, need some amplification to truly sing. Chicken due ponti, plump breast meat and three nicely sized shrimp coated in a bland flour-thickened sauce, is another perfectly palatable though exceedingly mild dish. Some of the pastas, conversely, are more heavy-handed. Rigatoni all'Amatriciana is oversauced to the point of blanketing, making its bacon shards all but undetectable. Cappellini con granchio, a dish that should be a study in subtlety, nearly drowns both the tiny strands of angel hair pasta and the small chunks of crabmeat in its brothy white wine sauce. Yet the kitchen, which seems to grow increasingly more solid with each visit, finds a balance with meats like the Milanese, a huge flat slab of pork breaded and fried, served with a side of lemony arugula, the whole plate sweetened with balsamic drizzle. Veal saltimbocca layers almost-crisp prosciutto over flour-dredged cutlets embedded with fragrant sage, like leaves pressed in wax paper. Chicken cacciatore, the hunter's stew, falls off the bone in moist, tomatoey mouthfuls. Homey sides might include pan-softened escarole glistening with olive oil and bursting with garlic, sautéed green and wax beans or crisp rosemary potatoes. A huge wedge of tiramisu is generously soaked in rum and powdered with cocoa so that it reaches a perfect tiramisu trifecta of juicy, chocolately and creamy. I was most surprised by the cool loveliness of the anise-flavored pannacotta, a firm and delicate eggless custard embellished with swirls of chocolate and raspberry sauce. There's also a list of sorbets and gelatos and a flaky homemade cannoli stuffed with chocolate-chip ricotta. It's good, if a bit too sweet. But who's complaining? To see a cannoli coming out of a once-dormant kitchen is a beautiful thing. Let's hope Franco's will keep 'em coming. | | | |||||||||||||
 | |||||||||||||||
| ©2007 Francos Trattoria |
