Antico Forno

Naples, Florence, and Milan, all in one North End restaurant

by Jeffrey Gantz

93 Salem Street (North End), Boston; 723-6733
Open for dinner Sun - Thurs, 3:30 to 10 p.m.,
and on Fri and Sat, 3:30 to 10:30 p.m.
(Lunch served Mon - Sat, 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.,
and Sun from noon to 3:30 p.m.)
All major credit cards
Beer and wine
Sidewalk-level access

Ribollita: it's a Tuscan soup that's "reboiled." Can advertising your dish as leftovers hook customers? Believe me, this concoction of white beans, red cabbage, red onion, leeks, garlic, celery or fennel, carrots, tomato, and ham, all soaked up with generous slices of unsalted bread, will gladden the heart of any Florentine. Like most stews, it just gets better with reheating.

When I walked into Antico Forno, I though that it must be a Tuscan restaurant. It has a homey, rustic atmosphere characteristic of central Italy: brick-brown square-tiled floor, terra-cotta walls, simple wooden tables and chairs, hanging lights and ceiling fans, dried flowers in vases on the wall. On one side, a hutch with bottles of the house red (a respectable Cantine from the Piedmont) and loaves of country bread; on the other, a wood-fired brick oven with a statue of St. Rocco in its alcove, and a huge standing vase in what looks from a distance like one of the famous Deruta patterns (in fact, it was made in Morocco and purchased at Filene's). You could be sitting in a friend's kitchen in Cortona, or Castiglion Fiorentino.

In fact, chef and co-owner Mario Nocera (he's also co-owner of Terramia, just across the street) is from Salerno, and his menu leans toward Neapolitan cuisine. Antico Forno is a cozy, neighborhood kind of place; many of the customers, you'll observe, are well known to the serving staff. This is not a restaurant for intimate dinners or discreet conversations; when it's crowded it can be quite noisy. It is a place to enjoy hearty, honest food at fair prices.

That is, as long as you don't fill up on the country bread and olives in green oil that land on your table when you sit down. The lunch menu offers soups (that ribollita), salads (buffalo mozzarella and tomato; a Tuscan panzanella, or bread salad, with tuna), sandwiches (oven-roasted lamb; grilled chicken breast with fresh mozzarella), pastas (linguine with clams and mussels; rigatoni with Italian sausage), and pizzas baked in that wood oven. Dinner adds some new appetizers and pastas, plus an entree list: oven-roasted chicken with garlic and herbs, wood-grilled swordfish with a balsamic vinaigrette, rabbit baked in agrodolce sauce. There are also specials, usually seafood-oriented -- lobster ravioli, for example, or blue marlin.

Grilled vegetables and cheese with olive oil ($7.50 at lunch; $8.50 at dinner) is a handsome hot enamel serving dish of eggplant, zucchini, orange peppers, and a bit of tomato, all covering -- and warming -- a salad of radicchio and romaine, with two pieces of grilled smoked mozzarella and some grilled flatbread. The flatbread had dried out somewhat, but the rest was a revelation of grilled-vegetable flavors -- the zucchini in long, impressive strips, the eggplant in large rounds, all set off by first-rate olive oil.

The ribollita ($5.50 at lunch) arrives in a terra-cotta crock and offers the same country goodness, even without any cabbage: cannellini and vegetables drizzled with parmesan and olive oil, served with ample bread to soak it up. Baby octopus and mussels in a spicy plum-tomato sauce ($8 at lunch) and rolled eggplant stuffed with fresh mozzarella, ricotta, and basil and baked in tomato sauce ($8.50 at dinner) are similarly excellent. The oven-roasted lamb sandwich with Calabrian peppers and onions ($6.50 at lunch) is a delightfully messy affair, the thick bread soaking up the juices. The mixed-green salad ($3 at dinner) -- actually red and green -- exemplifies what's right about this restaurant: no pretension, just fresh radicchio, mesclun, arugula, and romaine in a balsamic vinaigrette.

The pastas, all of which are served in some variety of fresh plum-tomato sauce, reflect Antico Forno's Neapolitan origins. Oven-baked fusilli and beans ($7), a traditional dish, comes in an earthenware crock with bits of carrot and skin-on potatoes. Linguine with calamari in a puttanesca sauce ($11.50 at dinner) didn't give much evidence of the promised capers, and the pasta, al dente on arrival, continued to cook in the dish. But the tomato sauce was fresh and nicely balanced, and the calamari rings and tentacles were tender. A dinner pasta special of homemade ravioli stuffed with shrimp and lobster ($15) featured a cream-based lobster sauce, with sun-dried tomatoes adding a pleasing sharpness. Pizza with artichoke hearts, porcini, cherry tomatoes, and buffalo mozzarella ($13.50 at dinner) was crisp to a fault, but the toppings were unexceptionable.

The entrees move north, to Tuscany and Lombardy. Rabbit with plum tomatoes, olives, rosemary, and balsamic vinegar ($15.50) offered chunks of tender rabbit in a sauce with big sprigs of rosemary that defined but didn't overpower the dish. The accompanying zucchini and roast potatoes were topped with a bit of pepper. Wood-grilled lamb chops with roasted-garlic mashed potatoes ($15) tasted more of a lemon or balsamic marinade than the wood grilling; the potatoes were redolent of rosemary, and the baby asparagus was toothsome and flavorful, an exemplary vegetable. Roasted veal stuffed with spinach, mushrooms, and fontina and served with a three-cheese (mozzarella, ricotta, parmesan) asparagus risotto ($16) seemed to have been marinated in milk or cream and cooked with black pepper and olive oil. It's a superb example of Milanese cuisine, the softness and creaminess of the veal complementing the smoothness of the perfectly cooked risotto.

The wine list is solid but not long or particularly inspired. A 1994 Rosso di Montalcino from Argiano ($28) was big, with huge fruit and good tannic structure; Le Bocce's 1993 Chianti Riserva ($26) was dark but a little monochromatic, though it did open up in the course of the meal. A 1993 Avignonesi Sangiovese ($19) was lighter, with smoky notes, fairly priced but not extraordinary. The non-Italian reds seem inappropriate (a cabernet franc?); the white selections could use an Alsatian pinot gris or gewürztraminer.

Coffee is excellent. The "dessert of the day," usually a tiramisú, is fine, but you're not likely to want it -- if there's one problem at Antico Forno, it's that the appetizers and pastas, in healthy but not huge portions, are so filling. That's what happens when you serve real food. If you want a lighter dessert, Biscotti's Pasticceria is next door, and Calore (fresh fruit) is two doors down. Antico Forno gives you the best of Italian country cooking. And it doesn't get much better than that.