Taverna is ear-piercing. This is odd, because thought has been given to sound. While Taverna has a concrete floor, it has cloth-covered baffles in the ceiling to minimize sonic glare. Still noise sneaks through, leaving one to wonder what the roar would be if the ceiling were baffle-less. There would be no room to hear yourself taste
Tom Jenkins
Ah, risotto: When done right, it's heavenly. Taverna does
it right.
Location Info
Details
Pizza $10
Carpaccio $9
Meats $12
Seafood risotto $15
Shrimp/pesto risotto $15
Perch $17.50
Pork chop $17
Lobster ravioli $18
Panna cotta $6
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Oddly, the noise wasn't a detraction. It wasn't shrill. It didn't scour the inner ear or belt-sand other senses. It was, how you say in the hospitality trade, energizing. It buzzed. Squint your eyes a certain way and you almost felt hip.
Still, it was hard to converse. Our server didn't seem to have any trouble, though. "Our risotto is the best," he said in a firm megaphone voice. Such conviction is hard to ignore, especially when it involves carb heresy. Well, then, let's have the risotto ai frutti di mare. The frutti di mare is this: clams, mussels, calamari and shrimp--loads of all of it. None of it has off flavors--not so much as a hint of errant swamp scum. These meats are clean, sweet, delicious. The coarse grains of rice are creamy yet firm and separate and saddled with a pronounced punch of pepper--maybe too much. It might be good to dial it down a little to let other flavors peek through.
Anyone can hit a risotto homer once. But twice? Here's the pitch: risotto agli scampi e zucchini. It is equally as good as the frutti di mare--this in spite of the fact that the pesto pleasure principle has been pounded into ruin by needless repetition. Pesto is what kiwi fruit was to plate garnishes; what balsamic is to culinary fluids. With very rare exceptions it triggers yawns from overuse.
Too often pesto is a mindless doodad standing in for lack of imagination, or a thing to cloak the incompetence of the other ingredients, treacherously treading over the mind with careless garlic burn buffered by toasted pine nuts. No pine nuts here. Didn't need them. Juicy, briny shrimp took care of whatever outrageous garlic (sometimes basil) imbalances there might be. There weren't any. But it did have this unusual feature: thin orange threads tossed over the top of the risotto mound. They behaved like sweet potato shavings, but this interpretation would be wrong. They are strings of fried carrot, little things that played off the sweetness of the shrimp while mimicking a pine nut role. Genius, that.
But pizza is also part of the Taverna headline. The pies aren't bad, but they certainly don't blitz the senses like the risotto does. How could they? Risotto is a singularly sublime substance, one that becomes irrevocably tragic when the stirring is muffed. When pizza is muffed, all you have to do is throw on more pepperoni and shake some cheese from a green can. Here the sampling was Romana: tomatoes, mozzarella, oregano, olives, capers and anchovies. Fear always grips when those little fish are mentioned as a pizza topping, though they're certainly not more frightening than pineapple. So I ordered a plate of extras, which triggers other anxieties. Anchovies baked into a pie become flattened, dried and extracted. They resemble insects embedded in a radiator after a long interstate run: dull, enervated and tattered with no knowledge of what hit them. The ones on the plate are profoundly different. They're plump. They shimmer. The edges are smooth. They know they've died for a cause greater than themselves.
Lay them out on the pie to decipher the contrasts. The cooked fish are woven into the fabric of the toppings, frozen in a mozzarella weave. They're a bit chalky in the mouth--gritty, like you're eating pulverized bone (and you are). The fresh ones next to them flash a smooth gloss, and they're almost juicy (though the thought of anchovy juice triggers a whole new set of creeps). Maybe pie makers have gotten it wrong with these. Maybe this is why anchovies on pizza--while dazzling in theory--most often result in disappointment. Cooking anchovies into a pizza seems to draw out all of the wincing anchovy stereotypes. They're strong. They're salty. They stink.
Not so if you drape them on later, as a baking epilogue. Here they perform. They're lively, amusing, they don't stink (as much). Skip over this little fish drama, though, and the pie flaws become manifest. Like the noise, they aren't intrusively nettlesome; they just impede the conversation with the palate. The crust is inconsistent. The outside is crackly, while just an inch inward the pie droops and sags. The crust doesn't hold its own. Other than as a bed for toppings, it becomes irrelevant.
Alberto Lombardi of Lombardi's and the defunct Lombardi Mare and Bizu is the craftsman behind Taverna. On the outside, the building is blood red with olive green shutters. Here's a peculiar thing: A Taverna picture postcard capturing the front door and the oval Taverna shingle was shot during a snow storm, thick beads of white fluff edging the patio railing and the roof line. Dallas during snow; risotto during Atkins. The counterintuitive touches are compelling.
Inside, the walls are textured cream with a deep red curtain serving as an entrance portal. An open kitchen with a wood-burning oven trimmed generously in copper provides a bit of culinary majesty.
