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[Dining Out]

Limoncello
Too bad Paul Revere couldn’t eat like this
BY ROBERT NADEAU

dining out
Limoncello
(617) 523-4480
190 North Street (North End), Boston
Open Sun–Thurs, 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri–Sat, 11 a.m.–11 p.m.
AE, MC, Vi
Full bar
Street-level access
No valet parking

Limoncello’s location — a few doors down from Paul Revere’s house — evokes pleasant reveries about how much more fun historical re-enactments would be if the restaurant had opened a few hundred years earlier. We could commemorate the Boston Tea Party with ye olde authentick pasta supper (eaten with one’s hands from a wooden trencher), instead of trying to find some dusty plaque in the Combat Zone. After smashing up the tea chests, the proud Sons of Liberty could have enjoyed cappuccino instead of herbal tea. With enough cappuccino, they might have finished the whole revolution by 1768, and thus the second Bush presidency would already be over ...

Oh well, back to reality. Limoncello is a Southern Italian liqueur made from lemon peels, and a fitting name for a restaurant that both serves the liqueur and aspires to the cuisine of Calabria, the toe of the boot. The location does affect things, however, promoting a tourist red-sauce menu at lunch, and probably raising some prices at dinner. The room has café windows opening to the street — generally pleasant in the summer, although they sometimes allow in foul smells from Boston Harbor. As in the old North End, the background music is tenor arias; the murals are of tourist Rome, Venice, and Florence; and the floor is tiled. As in the new North End, you are asked if you want " regular or sparkling water, " either answer producing a $5 bottle of San Pellegrino. Tap water is available, under the rubric of " ice water, " and is refilled frequently.

The bread is superb, an oily Tuscan loaf with aroma and " chew. " A little plate of olives is the only thing to lubricate it, but a question produces offers of butter and virgin olive oil, the latter in a cruet with balsamic vinegar. In fact, any inquiry at Limoncello elicits offers. My wife got an off-the-menu arugula salad as a result of a question about which greens came with a menu salad. When my Israeli cousin asked about cannoli, the restaurant sent out for one from Mike’s Bakery. The waiters here like to talk food with customers, and come up with all kinds of accommodations. If you prefer just-the-facts service, they may seem pushy.

The bread is so good, some may be tempted to skip the expensive appetizers, or to split a pasta course. But if price is no object, you won’t go wrong with scallops Limoncello ($12). These are glorious sea scallops, three halved on the equator to make six disks of caramelized perfection in a meaty sauce that does no harm, surrounding a nice salad of field greens. The caprese salad ($9) of fresh mozzarella didn’t quite have the tomatoes it needed by early July, though the green basil was powerfully scented, and the central arugula was excellent. A special salad with real buffalo mozzarella ($13) had the same tomato problem, and its creamier cheese made the caprese look even weaker.

At these prices, one might well move over to an order of spaghetti al pomodoro fresco ($10), which looks like a side order of rubber spaghetti, but has a fresh tomato sauce with enough seasonally appropriate cherry tomatoes (and some of their seeds) to wake up the appetite. Better still was the gnocchi with wild mushrooms ($13), a bowl of bay-scallop-size pasta pillows with a tomato-mushroom sauce (and a hint of cream). They weren’t the lightest gnocchi in the neighborhood, nor the heaviest, and the wild mushrooms were mostly tame " baby bellas. " But this was close enough to pasta heaven.

For the full trip, it would have to be the taglioni al Limoncello ($17), a dish of clearly homemade pasta — think square spaghetti with that special bitey texture — in a creamy garlic sauce with very nicely done jumbo shrimp, and flakes of that first good basil.

The seafood specialty is Chilean sea bass, called " Bronzino di Mare " ($24). The Limoncello approach is to treat this versatile fish as scrod and bake it under a robe of buttered crumbs, and a richer scrod Boston has never tasted. The garnish was good baked cherry tomatoes, good underdone green beans, and inexplicably cold roast potatoes. A special on " red snapper fish " Livornese ($20) was not as fabulous, but very good with a tomato-caper-black-olive sauce.

Zuppa di pesce ($28) is generous at the price, and promising, but ours was flawed by some bad seafood, probably a few mussels. This infected the peppery broth, which made the dish hard to eat (and got it taken off our check when we complained). However, the wealth of seafood presented was certainly impressive: a half-lobster, more of the fine jumbo shrimp and scallops (reappearing on mixed-seafood plates at last), baby octopus, salmon and a white fish (perhaps swordfish), clams, mussels, and squid.

Limoncello’s wine list is almost entirely Italian, much of it over $30 a bottle, although the house pinot grigio, merlot, Chianti, and white zinfandel come in at $22. We tried a 1998 Barbera d’Asti from L’Avocata ($34) and I would rate it very good for food, a dry wine with plenty of structure, but lacking some of the cherry-berry fruit of the barbera grape, especially in that vintage.

The desserts ($7.50) are flown in by Bindi. Tiramisu is rather flat and more creamy than anything else, but a chocolate tartufo (truffle) was a dandy combination of gelato and cocoa coating. The tartufo Limoncello is lemon sorbet coated with crunchy meringue crumbs — very refreshing, although the Italian photo shows a creamy center our shipment didn’t have.

As for coffee, had Limoncello been near the Revere house in 1775, Paul could have stopped in for espresso or cappuccino and warned patriots all the way to Maine. The British would never have caught him on this rocket fuel. This is a restaurant where the difference between a " long " espresso (a little more water per bean) and a " short " (really darn strong) is understood and honored.

Service is a strong point at Limoncello once you adjust to the culture. The atmosphere is familiar and pleasant enough, but needs tuning. At dusk the lights dimmed, brightened, redimmed, and blinked a few times. There is that problem with the outside air. The waiters work around these disruptions, though, sometimes soothing with a complimentary after-dinner taste of limoncello. Just think of it as a family place, and remember that Italian families like a kid who eats a lot.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.

Issue Date: July 19-26, 2001




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