 
|
|||||
              
|
Chef's flavorful Mediterranean style shows up in every dish at La Cucina Flegrea Friday, July 24, 1998 By Woodene Merriman, Post-Gazette Dining Critic
By 7 p.m. on a hot Tuesday night, a cluster of people waits outside La Cucina Flegrea, many of them clutching a brown paper sack covering a wine bottle. The restaurant has been filled since about 6 p.m.
What's the big attraction? Certainly not the restaurant itself - small and cramped, with tables so close it's impossible to carry on a private conversation. Not the wine list; there isn't any. Not the ambiance; it's plain and usually noisy.
What's more, the servings are not gargantuan, as Pittsburghers seem to expect, and it's not a good place to take children.
The attraction is the food - authentic Italian and Mediterranean dishes prepared by chef/owner Anna Fevola, an immigrant who learned to cook in her native Campi Flegrei, outside Naples.
Every day she bakes eight loaves of bread. Every day she makes three new desserts. Every day she makes a fresh soup. And every day she prepares, to order, superb entrees like the spaghetti alla arugula and scallopine alla Anna the server is placing in front of us.
The pasta dish is quite unlike any other I've had in Pittsburgh, with a garlic and olive oil sauce, pine nuts, raisins, black olives and a dash of hot pepper, and fresh arugula and grated cheese over the top - a fine combination of flavors and textures.
The veal scallopine is not only tender, but the light sauce tastes of olive oil, butter and wine - no heavy beef base was used here. With mushrooms, artichokes and sun-dried tomatoes, it's a fine rendition of a classic dish.
We're sitting in the entryway of the little restaurant. Anna Fevola and her aides are cooking at the open kitchen just across from us, chatting occasionally with diners who come and go. It's not nearly as crowded or noisy as the main dining room. People waiting for tables are asked to stand on the other side of the glass door entrance.
We've already finished an order of little Prince Edward Island mussels and tiny clams sauteed in olive oil with garlic and white wine. The sauce was so good even His Honor sopped it up with chunks of the chef's brown bread.
Anna Fevola says she loves to cook, and it shows in every dish. Salads, made of tender mixed greens with wedges of tomatoes, have a distinctive anise-flavored house dressing. Unfortunately they are plated ahead and held in the cooler near the entrance. Greens taste better if they are not so cold. But you get to see them as you enter, and know what you're ordering. One night we noticed the tomatoes were so unripe that we just skipped the salad.
One of the most popular appetizers is bruschetta. It has a nice, finely chopped tomato and olive topping, but be forewarned: the earthy bread, brushed with olive oil and toasted, can get hard in the toasting. With bruschetta, crisp is good, hard is not.
There are plenty of other appetizers that sound intriguing, such as a potato croquette with mozzarella and spices and fresh buffalo mozzarella with sliced tomatoes, basil and olive oil. The daily soup might be asparagus and potato, with lots of chunks of both in the broth, or a superb, pale orange and slightly peppery bean soup sprinkled with cheese.
Entrees could be one of nine pastas, including a special pasta of the day and another favorite of mine, rigatoni in vodka sauce. The chef uses sun-dried and fresh tomatoes, pearl onions and reggiano cheese in her version of this dish.
Eleven seafood, chicken and meat entrees, including another daily special, are on the menu. Picture it: A thick, silken portion of sauteed fresh cod comes with a bright red topping of fresh tomatoes with garlic, olives and other spices, a dish of escarole sauteed with pine nuts on the side.
If you can't decide, go with one of the daily specials. If you're in the noisy dining room, and you can't hear or understand the soft-spoken waitress' description, it won't matter. It's going to be good.
Or rather, it will be "wonderful, wonderful, wonderful" as the woman seated next to me kept exclaiming loudly one night as she read down through the menu. Her friend was new to La Cucina, and she was impressing her with all the dishes she's had at the restaurant. "E-5 is wonderful. E-6 is wonderful. E-7 is wonderful." Everything she's had has been "wonderful."
Anna Fevola works at La Cucina from about 9 a.m. until after closing, when she helps to clean up, six days a week. Early in the day she prepares the desserts. We've had mimosa, a sponge cake with chantilly cream and orange liqueur, and a cream-filled pastry called zupeta. Both, shall I say, were wonderful.
Fevola never went to cooking school. "All that money just to learn to cook pasta," she says. She did try culinary classes for a short time after she and husband Antonio came to Pittsburgh, but the American measurements of ounces and cups were too confusing for a cook accustomed to the metric system.
After leaving Italy, she cooked in Ireland while Antonio was working for his master's degree. Their 7-year-old son has an Irish name, Kiernan. In Pittsburgh she has cooked for Marriott in their catering services before opening La Cucina Flegrea in April. But this is her first attempt at a restaurant. "I thought nobody would like my food," she says.
Not to worry. Like the woman at the next table said, it's wonderful.
LA CUCINA FLEGREA
|
||||
Hours: 5-10 p.m., every day but Sunday.