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The Real Deal
Sorrentino Trades Hollywood Ravishments for Subtle
Sicilian Authenticity
by Paul Constant, The Stranger
Sometimes Italian cooking, more than any other kind
of ethnic food, suffers under the weight of crushing
expectations. Burritos, for instance, can be both
fantastic food-snob treasures and silly, disposable gut
fillers. But for whatever reason—I personally blame the
movies, with their huge gangster banquets that provide
viewers with a welcome dose of humanity amid all the
violence—people expect Italian food to be pure magic
every time. It should be filling, garlicky yet still
subtle, not too expensive, and it should somehow leave
the diner spent, giddy, and a better person for eating
it.
Sorrentino is about as Italian as you can get in
Seattle. A small Sicilian woman micromanages the place,
often kicking the chef out of his own kitchen to cook
the particularly tetchy dishes. On certain nights, an
accordion player goes from table to table, squeezing his
little stories of love and heartbreak. It is, in a word,
authentic.
Authentic regional Italian food can cause problems
for the uninitiated. First: There's no garlic anywhere.
This can be surprising in a dish like the lasagna verde
($13.50), which, when compared to the lasagna of
commercials and general-interest cookbooks, seems like a
small, flat, bland square of cheese and pasta. Never
mind that the cheese is high quality and the pasta is
homemade, supported with béchamel and Bolognese—the
lasagna is downright subtle, and that's surprising, and
possibly even disappointing if you're expecting a
steroidal pool of ricotta and red sauce.
The spaghetti tarantina ($10.50) is a similar
situation: It's a bowl filled with homemade spaghetti
and mussels. Salty and tossed with olive oil, it's a
perfect Italian dish, but it might be too deceptively
simple to impress the way that it really should.
The real knockout here is the house specialty, the
couscous con pesce e aragosta ($30). Forget spongy boxed
couscous, this homemade (!) couscous is fabulous: Each
grain of pasta is its own tiny little ecosystem of
delicious, and a generous mound of it is covered by a
spicy red sauce, adorned with shrimp and topped with a
perfectly cooked lobster tail. It's a meal so good that
you want to serenade it with sexy Dean Martin songs.
There are elements of Sorrentino, though, that aren't
so much subtle as just plain unexceptional. It's
unfortunate that they bill themselves as a pizzeria,
because the pizza carciofini ($10.50) is kind of
disastrous. The crust is bland and the tomato sauce
could use quite a bit more flavor. The mozzarella
cheese, again, is impeccable, as are the whole black
olives, but the artichokes are dull wet lumps and
pancetta is spread over the whole thing in flavorless,
transparent slices, when hunks of meat would be better.
Pizza isn't Sorrentino's only misfire: The Caesar
salad ($7.50) is coated with less of a dressing than a
paste and, though the brisk anchovy flavor leaves no
doubt that it's homemade, it also creates an
unbelievably dry salad. The house's Sicilian appetizer,
the caponata ($9), is basically a plate of caramelized
eggplant, and it tastes as fresh and potent as a fried
dish could hope to taste, but it's lacking the kick that
a specialty appetizer deserves.
Sorrentino's service is perfect. Eager waiters and
waitresses come to the table exactly as often as they
should, and their accented inquiries (a waiter
brandishing a ridiculously long grinder flirted with my
dining companion by raising his eyebrow and saying:
"Pepper, lady?") are nothing less than charming.
Equally charming are the desserts: a cannoli ($6.50)
that's got just the right amount of savory ricotta to
balance the sweet shell and powdered sugar, and a
creamy, rummy tiramisu ($6.95) that's textured like an
expertly made mousse. Finally, Sorrentino makes its own
zesty limoncello, which can and should be enjoyed
without accompaniment, in shot glasses ($6), before
venturing into the more adventurous drinks. The
Limontini ($7.50), made from the limoncello, vanilla
vodka, and pomegranate juice, is a hyphen-tini that can
be enjoyed on its own merits: It's dangerously as
refreshing as a fresh-squeezed juice, and twice as
delicious.
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