Went to F’Amelia’s patio last night. We’ve been a number of times before and it is a good neighbourhood restaurant, though uneven at times. We chose it because it because we are still not doing indoor dining and our friends are less adventurous eaters, so we figured this would be a safe bet.
The patio is semi-enclosed, with gaps near the tops of the walls for ventilation. We had been skeptical in the past about whether it was truly open air, but our friends had an expensive CO2 monitor that showed similar readings to outside. The heat lamps were very warm and the same CO2 monitor showed a temperature of about 30 (I delayered down to a T-shirt).
Disappointingly servers were unmasked. They also mixed up one of our orders, bringing a funghi pizza instead of a funghi salad. They didn’t apologize but did take it off our bill at least. This has been fairly typical of the service we have had there.
We started with cocktails, which are generally good, if unadventurous:
- Italian sour: Absolut, Aperol, fresh citrus, orange simple syrup and finished with red wine.
- F’Amelia Mule: Absolut, ginger beer and fresh lime juice.
We also had a glass of Baldovino, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo DOC (no year) - it was fine but not particularly interesting.
We started with the Quattro Stagioni pizza with crushed San Marzano tomatoes, fior di latte, (1) artichokes, (2) mushrooms, (3) house smoked ham, (4) black olives, grana Padano and EVOO - nice crust, good flavours. In general, the pizzas here are safe bets. Our friends had the pear, honey, gorgonzola, proscuitto, an arugula, which also remains very good.
Our favourite pasta in the past has been the braised rabbit pappardelle with thyme and rosemary, oyster mushrooms, black kale and garlic confit. This time and the time previous, it has been undersalted - otherwise lovely supply rabbit, nice herb flavours.
We decided to try the saffron risotto de mariscos with lobster, scallions and topped with red pepper - definitely not risotto, and also undersalted. Definitely skip.
Fo dessert we had the lemon ricotta cheesecake - this remains excellent, not too sweet, a gentle amount of lemon.