Assaggio

Who needs chic simplicity when you can have North End by the plateful?

Dining Out by Stephen Heuser

29 Prince Street (North End); (617) 227-7380
Open daily, noon-midnight
Full bar
AE, Di, MC, Visa
Sidewalk-level access

Here's to excess. Not food excess, I mean -- aesthetic excess. The kind where you start with a ceiling choked with plastic grape vines and throw in some ivy for good measure; where you stick some Zeus heads and faux columns to a wall that's already decorated in trompe l'oeil marble blocks; where you top off a room full of woodland scenes with a midnight-blue overhead rendering of the zodiac. For years, the standard model for North End restaurants has been to try to re-create Italy in a few hundred square feet. Assaggio is more ambitious: it tries to re-create thousands of years of Roman history at once. Somehow it all holds together, this scheme totally unrestrained by any sense of what we might think of as taste, and turns out to be more fun than any number of self-consciously cool bistros.

Assaggio does call itself a bistro -- Assaggio Bistro and Wine Bar -- but it isn't one. Strip away the postmodern Little Italy trappings and you have a red-sauce restaurant for the '90s, with the usual giant portions, great marinara sauce, indifferent bread, and tiramisu at the end. Restraint just isn't in the vocabulary here. I've eaten more squid in three days of Assaggio food (two meals at the restaurant, one night of leftovers) than I've had in three months of normal restaurant eating. Same with polenta. And I haven't even started on my second round of veal yet.

My favorite items from two nights of Assaggio dinners were the arancini on the hot antipasto plate ($9.95). Arancini are spheres of rice -- risotto balls, actually -- a little bigger than golf balls, lightly breaded on the outside and fried. You get two of them on a plate, along with spidini (grilled lamb chunks on a skewer) and calamari. The rice balls -- golden and just-crispy on the outside, saffron yellow on the inside -- had a bit of cheese to bind them together and a little pocket of ground meat in the center. You don't find arancini everywhere; they have the feeling of something warm and traditional that hasn't yet been turned into Italo-American schtick.

I wouldn't say quite the same thing about the fried calamari. Squid is usually cut up into disks (slices of the squid body) and tentacles (the head), then breaded and fried. Here the body is cut into thick cylinders, with the result that the batter on the inside stays squishy while the outside turns crisp. This held true both on the antipasto plate and on the straight calamari plate ($8.95), which contained easily enough calamari to feed three people.

We tried two salads, one spinach with sliced portobello mushrooms ($7.95) and the other a modern arugula-radicchio-endive mix ($7.95). As produce goes, spinach in winter is usually a better bet than arugula, which seems to lose its pepperiness in the off-season. Here both salads were good; the fuller taste of the spinach was met by a slightly over-cheesy dressing, and the whole thing was tiled with square sheets of pecorino. The arugula-radicchio-endive was a little more subtle -- less fully flavored, less coated with cheese.

Assaggio's menu is the usual broadsheet of salads, pastas, pizzas, meats, and risottos. Risotto is notoriously hard for restaurants to get right (the laborious cooking process isn't practical when you're preparing a hundred-dinners a night), but the mushroom risotto here ($9.95) acquitted itself well. It was a little less glutinous than home-cooked risotto tends to be, but the flavor was clean and made a nice base for the profuse, fleshy shiitake mushrooms sliced into it.

The lobster ravioli ($14.95) was nice, too, if unexceptional. These were the round, pillow-shaped kind of ravioli, stuffed with a purée of lobster meat and topped with a thick cream sauce. There wasn't anything identifiably wrong with the plate, but neither did it have the transcendent quality you hope for with lobster. In much the same vein was gnocchi in marinara sauce ($8.95), but then you don't expect transcendence from gnocchi. The marinara here was reduced to the density of tomato paste, which worked pretty well with the potato dumplings.

Marinara sauce was less successful poured over the osso bucco special ($18.95), a veal shank in the middle of a thick cloud of polenta. Osso bucco is usually braised until fork-tender, but this one -- though hardly tough -- didn't have quite that softness. One thing to watch for in osso bucco: in the center of the lamb shank is a bone, and inside the bone is a bit of marrow, the most delicious bit of the whole dish.

In a meal characterized by a general conformity to North End routine, what kept us going at Assaggio was the wine list. Assaggio Bistro and Wine Bar may not be in any meaningful sense a bistro, but it's a real wine bar, with over 100 bottles on its regular wine list, more than half of which are open for tastes ($1.50 to $3.50) and glasses ($4.25 to $9). In keeping with the general spirit of profusion, the "taste" -- usually something around two ounces -- is here probably twice that.

We paired off our wines, tasting two light Italian whites against each other, then two chardonnays, then two Chiantis. The results were interesting -- for instance, we preferred an Italian chardonnay, bottled by the huge producer Banfi, to the comparatively over-the-top Chateau St. Jean from California -- and the exercise was awfully cheap: $18.50 for six glasses of wine. At most restaurants the same game would set you back closer to $40.

Desserts at Assaggio (all $5.50) are pretty straightforward: tiramisu (cut in a wedge, like a slice of layer cake); fruit tart; sorbet. The lemon sorbet stood out for being tart and focused, and also for being served in a hollowed-out lemon rind. We didn't try the coffee (too full); we had agreeable service and a generally fine time. When you leave Assaggio the cooks wave good-bye; you walk past the fountains and the garlic arrangements and the little statue of an Italian chef, and you look at your new Assaggio matchbook and think: yep, I've been to the North End.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.

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