Teatro Goldoni

I learned three things last night: 1. one can find passable Italian food in DC, 2. Christine capisce Italian food in the north-Atlantic, and 3. nearly my entire selection of portable food containers comes from dining out.

I went to Olive Garden before it instituted its fancy Tuscan cooking academy. I considered going to Cascone's Italian Restaurant for prom (or had crushes on swimmers who went) and I have a brother who lives in Italy, all circumstantial facts that trend toward me understanding something about Italian. More recently and convincingly, I've spent days in the country, been kissed by a married Italian La Traviata fan in Bologna, and went to Catholic school. While my qualifications for judging may be dubious, I think good Italian food is largely subjectively (because it's ubiquitous but oftentimes wildly mediocre), but based on very unique Italian-food-eating memories. Also, empirical experience has shown that besides Acqua Al 2 (not on the top 100 list), I haven't found a restaurant in the District itself that offers a passable Italian meal I'd want to take my 7th grade Italian crush to.

Christine levied this challenge last night, too, to see if we could prove or disprove an Italian restaurant on the Washingtonian top 100 as being worthy of inclusion. Others have featured bad service and frigid waitstaff or tepid pasta, but Teatro Goldoni did something right to keep us three hours on a school night.

It started off mixed but still likable: the lighting was warm but luxurious and the tables and the bar were full of talkers gesticulating with swirling wine glasses, which makes a restaurant welcoming. I was able to be seated alone and while trying to clandestinely photograph the interior, was asked what I'd like to drink. I'm a simple-minded food critic and simply asked for an apertif, because that's what people drink when they go to restaurants.

Apparently, that's what people get to drink when they move to France for three months and re-transplant themselves into a non-French speaking environment and wonder why they make no sense. I thought I could either explain my desire for an appetite-building cocktail of the waiter's choosing or panic and ask for a Ricard [puzzled look in return]. "Do you have, you know, anisette, on the rocks with a side of water?" Fine. But bad call on my part.

Christine arrived in a breeze of glamor, like normal, of course, making all in the dining room forget Elizabeth Taylor is no longer with us. She ordered a Limoncello martini that outshined my I'll-settle-for-generic-anise-liquor as convincingly as gelato outshines Flintstones push-pops.

A key element of my amateur food critiquing that has been missing in the past.. year.. has been examining the nexus between food and love. I'm no more of a legit food critic than a particle physicist. I order food and forget what's in it. I taste ingredients that aren't even in the same family as what's actually in a dish. But I eat to savor and experience the lives of my friends, which Italian food liberally permits. Especially when my friends know Italian food. Once the breads--small, wheaty baguette slices, tomato-adorned foccacia and foot-long-and-thin breadsticks--were rolled out, the juicy girl talk got better with each plate.

Christine and I ordered seven plates between the two of us. That's right. We were involved in an anthropological/cultural/culinary geographical quest, however, to determine if DC Italian can hang with Rhode Island Italian. Christine relayed that Rhode Island has the highest concentration of Italians in the nation. I would have thought that would have been my gold-laméd, high-haired, don't-meet-regulation culotted eighth grade class at St. Charles Middle School and their seven circles of extended family, but Christine was right.

She ordered the artichoke salad, an Alice-in-Wonderland-remicient artichoke-as-mushroom laid horizontally on her plate with frisée on one end and a cold, roasted red pepper salad on the other. It was gorgeous.

I ordered the beef carpaccio (as my "only" appetizer, despite the temptation to order another). The meat was sliced impossibly slin, the argula was copious, and the parmesan was shred in adequate enough slices to hold its own in a full bite of steak, greens, and mushroom. The real clarifying ingredient was the lemon vinaigrette.

We took deep breaths, ordered full glasses of wine, and delved back into the types of truth-determining only red wine can bring. Dinner part one was the spinach cappellaci, the pre-determined pasta dish we mutually agreed on as being the best pick: spinach ravioli with a butternut squash filling, shaved and grated Parmesan, and sage butter. Christine knows sage butter. What luxury.

Next were the large plates. Christine ordered the chicken parmigiana that came with a side of spinach. I will faithfully relay that per Rhode Island standards, this dish needs a pasta accompaniment, to which I can attest. Spinach is good, but it's like having sugar-free maraschino cherries on a triple fudge chocolate sundae. The breading was robust yet balanced with the mozzarella and Christine approved of the marinara sauce.

I had the quail risotto. Risotto to me is like paella: "anyone" can make it because it comes in a box, but it takes an expert to do well. A successful risotto is magic: rich, creamy, cheesy, but with perfectly cooked rice. This succeeded and on the cusp of Springtime, this one successfully and richly featured quail and carrots, ingredients usually better suited to the dead of fall or winter. Rich and exquisite are understatements.

We were happy: the table was quiet enough for some serious girl talk yet intimate enough that the drunk New Yorker next to us was able to reiterate, at least three profanity-laden times, how huge the chicken parmigiana was. Right? Right? he kept asking. The charmers me and my friends meet.

Charmed, I'm sure.

The decor was warm and playful, as we observed before the final, debilitating round. The painted diamonds on the wall, along with the array of Venetian masks, lent a Carnevale feel to the restaurant. The women who rolled in after 10:30 in barely-visible skirts also contributed, but we were on our way out by then.

For dessert, Christine ordered the pistachio chocolate cake, exquisite in the cake execution with the pistachio tuile on top, but less successful in the pistachio ice cream (insufficiently pistachioed).

I had the tiramisu with berries. Small but dynamic, it impressed in its espresso glory but also in the unanticipated deliciousness of the cream and berries, an often-overlooked superlative combination for dessert.

To cap it off, Christine exposed me to a Rhode Island digestif: the espresso martini. "Creamy" is too rich, she noted to our waiter, who brought an aesthetically appealing but mediocre-ly flavorful drink with, nonetheless, a beautiful little coffee bean on top. It still blew my oft-ordered, bitter, keep-me-up-two-hours-later-than-normal single espresso with dessert out of the water.

Italy this is not: the spatial arrangement was very American, the music is a bit too poppy instead of Frank Sinatra-y (anachronistic and misplaced of me, yes) and the portions gigantic, but Teatro Goldoni was a restaurant with delicious food, effective and unobtrusive service, and a compellingly sympathetic environment for two girls with cocktails and Cabernet to discuss the travails of life and love over food. Phew, I got my nexus back.