Food & Wine

Voyage to Italy
Main Street’s Café Amici offers a cook’s tour of Italy, plus casual fare at Blu Smoke, pastries at Le Macaron and more.

Sarasota’s Main Street is so liberally studded with culinary gems it’s no wonder that one occasionally is overlooked. Take, for example, Cafe Amici. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked by on my way somewhere else, glancing in the windows and thinking I really should drop in soon. Lucky for me, I finally managed to open the door and walk in at the dinner hour.

Cafe Amici is a symphony of traditional regional Italian cooking served in a cozily unpretentious space. There’s a roomy bar toward the back, and off to the side is a dining room dominated by tables dressed in black and white linens. A banquet room is adjacent. Three tables offer sidewalk dining. Waiters are dressed in black and know their menu inside out.

In three printed pages the restaurant offers a cook’s tour of Italy from Puglia to Tuscany and beyond.

The antipasti list kicks off with mozzarella Lucullus, a baked starter of rosemary ham wrapped around housemade cheese, and works its way through carpaccio, bruschetta, slow-cooked calamari with capers and olives and several others to finish with salmon marinated in vinegar, olive oil and lemon.

As if that weren’t enough, a long and varied list of soups and salads follows.

Pasta is the next category, of course, with most but not all of the pastas homemade. Capellini, fettucine, penne, linguine, lasagna and gnocchi are bathed in everything from meaty ragu Bolognese to pink vodka sauce to ultra-creamy Gorgonzola and paired with the likes of squid, shrimp, chicken, eggplant, mushrooms and more. Secondi run the gamut from duck confit with Tuscan herbs to chicken pounded paper-thin in the Milanese style to rack of lamb in a Montepulciano wine sauce.

I suggest you sip the peachy prosecco cocktail called a Bellini and wallow in this printed plenitude. Choosing will be tough, but don’t decide until your waiter has recited the day’s specials.

For our starters, Colette and I went to the standing list. From the antipasti choices I selected an old favorite, eggplant rollatini ($7.95), plated with a fresh salad in a mustardy balsamic dressing. The portion and the combination were just right. The rolled eggplant stuffed with rich homemade mozzarella and ricotta cheeses spiked with basil and topped with a delicate marinara at Cafe Amici ranks with the best I’ve tasted in a long career at table.

From the list of salads Colette chose a stunner, as pretty on the plate as it was delicious. Portobello Zola ($6.95) stuffs a generous mushroom cap with mild, young Gorgonzola dolce, then drizzles it with a fragrant spiral of balsamic vinegar and serves it atop a salad of chopped organic greens. Delightful.

Many of the pasta and main dishes tempted us, but our waiter swayed us with his recitation of two specials that, while not on the menu, are prepared as close to every day as market availability allows.

Colette fell for the ossobuco Milanese ($33.95), that celestial dish of veal shank sprinkled with gremolata (a mixture of parsley, garlic and lemon peel), drizzled with olive oil and braised a couple of hours to fork tenderness on its marrow bone in wine and herbs. When done right, few dishes are more succulent and satisfying. Cafe Amici, which substitutes yummy homemade wide fettucine for risotto as a sauce-absorbing base layer for the meat, does ossobuco absolutely right.

I chose the grouper Livornese ($28.95), which the kitchen sometimes does with snapper if Gulf Coast Florida’s signature firm white fish is unavailable. Cafe Amici starts with a gorgeous piece of grouper, sautés it and sauces it in a chunky tomato-based ambrosia of a wine sauce spiked with black Kalamata olives, tangy capers, plenty of garlic, some parsley and red pepper flakes—sort of a putanesca without the anchovies but every bit as savory. On the evening we visited, the kitchen served this delectable prep atop a nice mix of cubed potatoes, julienned carrots and green peppers.

For dessert (come on, you know us!) I caved for cannoli Siciliani ($6.95), the real creamy crunchy deal topped with a strawberry rose, and washed it down with a modest tawny port.

Colette, always more temperate, chose an excellent espresso to accompany a toothsome, cool and equally creamy strawberry zabaione ($6.95), that apotheosis of custards.