Restaurant Review: Piccolino Italian Restaurant

An OK day in the neighborhood

By: Bill Kohlhaase
Published online: Friday, September 28, 2012
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

What makes a good neighborhood restaurant? Efficiency, friendliness, and familiarity; consistent, dependable preparations, the sort described as “home cooking”; and a location that’s convenient to where you live — bonus points if you can walk to it. Piccolino Italian Restaurant, on Agua Fría Street near its intersection with Siler Road, meets all the requirements except that last one. It’s a neighborhood restaurant without a neighborhood. Housed in a former Church’s Chicken outlet, it’s bordered by a Giant convenience market/filling station with a car wash on one side and the Prescott Studio’s metal-sculpture menagerie caged in chain-link on the other. Behind it is a big-rig truck garage. Across the street are commercial spaces, not all of them occupied. There’s a “there” there, but it’s not residential.

Piccolino also meets the criteria that distinguishes a great neighborhood restaurant from a simply good one: diners from other neighborhoods will travel to eat there. That describes nearly everyone who goes to Piccolino. But Piccolino, though frequently crowded with folks digging into plates of pasta and pizzas, is not a great restaurant. Its dishes, though consistently prepared and satisfying, are rarely exceptional. Why is it so popular? My belief, arrived at minus the aid of customer surveys, is that it probably gives most of its diners what they want: abundant, reasonably priced, competently prepared portions of classic Italian dishes, something akin to home cooking.

The comprehensive menu has some unique offerings — things with tempting titles like Pasta Boloco, made with chicken, green chile, red pepper flakes, butter, and Parmesan. The baked Lasagna Boloco is thick and warm, with green chile, a nice stringy blend of provolone and mozzarella, and a rich Alfredo sauce. The shrimp and scallops in the linguini Provençal have just a touch of smoky flavor from the grill, are backed by tomatoes of the bland grocery store sort, and are tossed with scallions and just-past-al-dente pasta. With better tomatoes, this dish might shine. Olga’s Favorite Pasta, too, suffers from ho-hum tomatoes; all skin, not yet perfectly ripe, and with less personality than your sister’s boyfriend. The grilled eggplant that was tossed in seemed hardly grilled. It was chewy and bitter, as eggplant that is not first salted and pressed can be. A heaping dollop of goat cheese, stirred into the sauce, saved this dish from being a complete loser.

Produce is a problem here — vegetables are not well chosen or well prepared. The California pizza with goat cheese, sun- dried tomatoes, and “fresh veggies” was a chewy challenge. The vegetables, especially the carrots, were almost raw. Grill those veggies, and this pie might please. Yet a combo pizza of pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, and bell peppers was a winner, with shards of pepper adding crunchy contrast. It made me think: if Piccolino were located near my home, I’d like to pull up to the takeout window (a holdover from its fast-food days) and have a boxed pizza slid through.

So it goes, good and not so. The veal Florentine, topped with spinach, was fine but not stellar, its brown sauce hinting at Marsala. The linguini with clams — it doesn’t get more classic than that — was satisfying, the pasta floating in soothing broth, the clams flavorful, though a bit tough from too much cooking. The calamari fritti was perfect, lightly breaded, quickly fried, and toothsome the way good calamari should be. The chopped Italian salad stands as the perfect symbol for Piccolino’s food: a heap of crisp lettuce blanketed in good but not-high-quality chopped meats, olives, and cheeses, all smoothly coming together in a pleasing whole. Another object lesson: the fresh bread, served with a side of marinara, was warm and flavorful with herbs and garlic at lunch but stiff and a bit stale during a dinner visit. The sauce, made from good canned tomatoes, was acidic and notably not so sweet. Thank goodness it was there, though; a meatball sandwich, with just a touch of sauce and cheese, was a bit dry and in need of it. But those meatballs were as good as homemade. Likewise the desserts, as if mom had made them herself.

Once you’re inside, you won’t recognize the site as a former fast-food joint, and the place is well stocked with servers who are spot on — until it’s time for the check. Luckily, it’s cozy enough inside that you can call them over. That meatball sandwich came with soup, and we were brought the Tuscan-wedding variety with little meatballs instead of the pasta fagiolo (with beans), which we wanted. We shrugged and started in before our server came with the correct soup. “I’m sorry,” she said. I wasn’t. Both were as good as if we’d made them ourselves.