With new Italian restaurants sprouting around town like mold on a piece of old focaccia, it's easy to forget that several trattorias have been plying the pappardelle for some time--and doing a good job of it.
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One of those standbys, Al Fresco, has been undergoing a few growing pains of its own. Under founder Jack Leone, this Market Street eatery started serving serious Italian ten years ago, before LoDo was even a twinkle in developers' eyes; five years ago Leone sold the place to Czech transplant and wunderkind chef Radek Cerny and his partner, Bruce Rahmani, who opened a European Cafe next door in the old home of Cafe Giovanni. In the ensuing years the pair added an Al Fresco in Boulder, Fort Collins and at Ninth and Lincoln in Denver--but Cerny has since sold his interest in all the Al Frescos, as well as the three European Cafes, to Rahmani and his Market Street executive chef, Lupe Gonzalez.
Breaking up is hard to do, and last year the restaurant grapevine buzzed with gossip regarding the Cerny-Rahmani split. Cerny ultimately moved on to a well-received solo venture, Papillon Cafe--but rumors continued to make the rounds that the Al Fresco quartet now constituted little more than chains.
Sour grapes, I say. After several visits to the Market Street location, I've discerned no decline at all. This shouldn't be surprising, really; Gonzalez worked with Cerny for fifteen years, and his experience clearly helped make for a seamless transition. In fact, the menu has changed little from the days of Cerny's involvement, and evidence of his intuitive ingredient pairings remains.
Of course, this is not a bottle-of-red, $8-plate-of-spaghetti, mom-and-pop spot. Al Fresco's dishes are as multi-layered as the many levels of its Market Street home, a historic landmark. Sadly, the lease on that space is up this year, and it looks like Rahmani may move both this Al Fresco and the nearby European Cafe to Brooks Towers, whose residents recently put their seal of approval on the deal--voting down Tony Roma's Ribs in the process. In the meantime, though, diners continue their calorie-burning treks to a table on one of the restaurant's four floors. The ground floor houses the bar and serves as the smoking section (smokers might not be able to make it to the third floor and, hey, heart attacks are not good for business), and also contains the kitchen and pizza ovens, which means anyone heading upstairs is treated to the kind of cheese-melting, garlic-roasting, bread-baking smells that make appetizers an immediate must.
Our bowl of calamari fritti con salsa ($6.95) appeared so quickly that the kitchen must have expected us to order it--not an altogether unreasonable notion, since these baby squid were exceptional and probably popular. Heavy on tentacles and light on batter, they were served with a smooth, spicy salsa that carried plenty of capers and a well-rounded chile bite that smacked of a high-quality powder. Such intense flavor turned out to be typical for Al Fresco, which proceeded to dazzle us with its minestrone ($2 for a cup). In Italian, minestra means "soup" and generally refers to a medium-thickness blend that often contains meat and vegetables. Minestrina means "little soup" and is usually comparable to a consomme or a thin broth. Minestrone is "big soup" and most likely hearty enough to serve as a meal in itself. Although Al Fresco's minestrone was more of a minestra in consistency, it was "big soup" all the way: cannellinis pureed with who-knows-what vegetables, along with bits of pasta and prosciutto and loads of cream. A bowl of this rich and flavorful stew would have been the end of us; a cup was the perfect accompaniment for the equally powerful Caesar salad ($2.50 with an entree), a comfortable-sized portion of potato-chip-crisp romaine tossed in a thick, anchovy-kissed, easy-on-the-garlic dressing and sprinkled with fresh-grated parmesan.
We could have stopped there and been satisfied--but then we would have missed the excellent entrees. I went with the fettuccine Al Fresco ($10.95), because few things in life are as rewarding as a good Alfredo, and I wasn't disappointed. Al Fresco's version was all cream and parmesan in perfect harmony, with fresh basil for extra flavor and a break from the richness. The only discordant note was the completely unnecessary addition of a toasted round of chevre, which I made the mistake of mixing into the Alfredo, where it completely took over. A creamy cheese sauce--especially one like this that stands beautifully on its own--doesn't need the garnish of an ultrarich cheese.
No such embellishments adorned the frutti di mare risotto ($16.95), but then, there was so much going on in this dish that we might not have noticed a stray piece of anything. An exemplary bowl of risotto had been thickened with plenty of parmesan and, from the taste of things, cooked in a broth made with every ingredient known to man, then topped with clams, shrimp, scallops and mussels. Just a bite of this sent us into eyes-rolling-in-the-back-of-the-head territory, and we didn't return to reality until there was nothing left on the plate but shellfish carcasses.
After that, we couldn't wait to return for lunch. This time we tried the torta Al Fresco ($6.95) that we'd been too full to test at dinner. While not as drop-dead delightful as the risotto, the lasagne-like torta came close. A few black-pepper noodles held together a cake of ricotta, parmesan, romano and mozzarella cheeses, bathed in bechamel and marinara sauces and interspersed with the potent house sausage. Add a few of Al Fresco's puffy, triangular rolls and the black-olive-packed tapenade that come with every meal, and this is one of the best lunch deals going. (It's also offered as part of Al Fresco's revived "express lunch," which guarantees food in fifteen minutes.) We also sampled a Margherita pizza ($6.95), a thin-crust pie baked in the wood-fired oven to a chewy crispness. The Margherita came covered--smothered, really--with large halves of sun-dried tomatoes, warm and squishy and well-matched by fresh basil, mozzarella, provolone and a touch of garlic.
