Florentine Café: One-Sauce Wonder? – Boston

I say tomato you say tomato. Like this famous saying, the tomato “sauces” at Café Florentine are the same sauce once they hit the plate, just pronounced differently. Sometimes, they even have the same flavor with different consistencies, and not in a good way…To be fair, it’s a decent marinera, but you’d think a couple years of culinary school could offer a little more variety…or something!

Dinner here made me nostalgic for the time Ben and I went to Hersheypark and rode all 12 rollercoasters. Dinner here was a rollercoaster, except my palate and my flipping stomach might have handled Hersheypark better.

Dinner started on a promising note. I sat in my slowly ascending rollercoaster car, being pulled up slowly by the comforting buzz of a good glass of Chianti, ordered by a man of excellent taste.

Then an entrée manifested as the huge initial drop where the camera flashes and catches your look of sheer thrill, right before it turns to terror. I tried my friend (the man of excellent taste)’s Mushroom Tortellini first, and it turned out to be the best dish at my table. The big, ricotta and portebella-stuffed tortellini put the bella in portabella, though I was sad about not having the opportunity to taste the cream sauce it comes with (my friend asked for tomato instead). Note: it does NOT come with the pound of red pepper flakes pictured here. 

My friend’s brother’s Gnocchi al Pomodoro was that lingering high that comes after the initial drop - perfect little chewy balls of potato goodness. Right on with the texture, right on with the flavor, and this particular version of the sauce was a good consistency.

Like all rollercoasters, the thrill wore off after the initial drop, as the ride turned into a series of unimpressive little hills. Those little bumps in the road were my linguini with clams and calamari. The clams were fine but the calamari didn’t taste fresh. Surprising considering my plateful of liquid should have been enough to keep them alive while I ate them…Same tomato sauce, more water. Sadly, the flavor of the seafood wasn’t at all cooked into the sauce, which makes me wonder where it actually went...

The final leg was a more pleasant series of tortuous fusilli-like turns but was still barely half the original thrill. The fusilli with seafood and half a lobster tail (at least I thought it was fusilli…) had a great pasta texture, but the sauce was a bit dry. Once again, both seafood dishes lacked unity – the seafood seemed more like an afterthought or a garnish, a pretty presentation that doesn’t really improve the overall quality of the ride.

Lingering conclusions/thoughts: the boot of Italy is probably giving the chef a giant kick in the…ummm…hat…for his ability to make one lone tomato sauce and for his inability to incorporate seafood into that one sauce…How is that possible when Italy is pretty much a giant isthmus?