As the weekend started, Gracie and I were discussing ideas for dinner on Friday night. I was drained from a busy week, but I thought that I would suck it up and cook dinner. We tossed around several ideas, when my brain lit up with an idea. “How about we go to a diner? By the time we spend the money on everything we need at the store, it’ll cost almost the same as going to a diner.” Gracie agreed, but after thinking about it a bit more, I started to crave a sandwich, especially pastrami…HA!! Good luck finding any place in the Bay Area that: 1. Serves decent pastrami or corned beef, and 2. Puts more than 2 slices of meat on a sandwich. (Yes, Eastcoasters, when they make a sandwich out here, they only put on 2, maybe 3 slices of meat..it’s truly a nightmare!) So I put that idea right out of my head and shelved the craving.
To the computer, to the internet and to the Yellow Pages to find something…..anything that would tickle my fancy. While searching, the name of a restaurant right in town caught my eye. “Dallimonti’s Italian Restaurant”…hmmm…but no website link in the yellow pages listing…grrrr. OK…I put the name in the search engine and voila! A website! It only took 30 seconds to convince me that we were going to dine there.
Gracie and I, along with her boyfriend(K) and her other friend, who will refer to from this point on as Ms. Fabulous, were on our way. When we reached the address, I noticed that it was kind of a “hole in the wall” in a strip mall. That’s not an insult..I love hole in the wall restaurants..they are usually the best.
So, I dropped Gracie off in front of the place and asked her to check to see what the wait time was for a table. I don’t wait longer than 10 minutes for a table anywhere. I hate waiting! Most of the time, there is NO reason to wait..especially when you go to those larger chain restaurants, there’s a 30 minute wait and half the tables are empty because they need to “stagger” their “guests” because the f#$king wait staff can’t handle more than two customers at a time. I can’t figure that one out….maybe they don’t want to work the staff too hard because they have the mentality of a handball. Maybe it’s because the 5 hosts/greeters don’t want to lift a finger and do anything. It’s a mystery and a shitty policy for any restaurant to have. And besides, I haven’t found any food worth waiting 30 minutes to sit down for…really!! But I digress..for now…..
No wait for the table..so we head in. The hostess was a lovely young lady that very politely greeted us. As she sat us, she asked if we had ever been there before. Responding that we had not, she explained that Dallimonti’s is a “family-style” restaurant. Soup, salad, bread and dessert is included in the price of each entree, but served family style. I knew that from what I read on their website and that is what initially attracted me to the place. As we sat, our salad plate and soup bowls were already on the table, along with our silverware, napkins and a pitcher of water.
Dallimonti’s is moderately decorated….framed pictures of scenes of Italy pepper the walls, the tables covered in the traditional red and white checked tablecloths, older wooden chairs-the kind that mom and dad had in the dining room back in the 80′s. In the background, good music was playing..songs from Sinatra, Dean Martin, C’e La Luna, Rosemary Clooney and things like that..the stuff I grew up on. Simple, homey and family is the impression I got. I liked it already.
The menu was pretty extensive with items ranging from steak, pasta, chicken and even veal-3 dishes as a matter of fact! YES-VEAL! A rarity these days. I can barely find it in the supermarkets and this is the first time in 7 years that I have ever seen it on a menu in a restaurant. That’s mostly because you have some hippie types that whined and threw their temper tantrums about the way veal was raised and slaughtered….Waaaa! Waaaa! Bunch of whining wimps…don’t like the way they’re raised and slaughtered? Too bad! Don’t eat it..and don’t spoil it for everyone else!! Ever been to a chicken farm or slaughter house? Ever seen what they do to beef cattle? Stop your friggin’ whining and get a life. Spend your time helping human beings instead of crying about delicious veal! But I digress again….
The waitress greeted us, talked about the specials, we ordered our entrees, and she headed off to get our soup. She returns, with a rolling cart, with our tureen, YES – tureen, of Minestrone soup, places it on the table and speeds off to another table. There is enough soup in the tureen for each of us to have 2 servings-very generous. I love minestrone and although it really is a vegetable based soup, I add meat to it when I make it myself. Some restaurants do, most don’t. Dallimonti’s is vegetable based and I must admit, very delicious. The vegetables were fresh and the broth was well seasoned. Gracie and I, being the hardcore Italians that we are, of course sprinkled some grated cheese into our soup. (and for those of you who are not Italian, or who live with your heads in gastronomic sand, “Grated cheese” is a simpler term for grated Parmesan cheese). We were also served a basket of lovely Italian-style sour dough bread….very delicious. Light on the inside, good chewy brown crust on the outside…the way Italian bread should be! Of course, before you knew it, K had killed the entire basket of bread, but luckily Gracie and I had enough to dunk in our soup broth.
A second hostess came to clear the soup bowls from the table, bring us more water, bread and our salad course, all while bantering with K about having eaten all the bread…she was very friendly and fun and gave me a warm impression. We were served a large bowl of salad, with homemade creamy Italian dressing and croutons. The croutons were homemade, from leftover bread, very tasty and crunchy. The salad was the typical salad blend of iceberg lettuce, carrots and red cabbage that you can buy in a bag in any supermarket. Dallimonti’s salad dressing was really good..very flavorful and tangy. And just enough on the salad. There was enough for one serving for each of us, although I wish there had been more. I would have loved a second serving, it was that tasty.
Onto the main course. In the interim, the second hostess, Christy (unbeknownst to me at the time, the owner) refilled our bread and butter again. K and I ordered the special, Seafood Cannelloni. Gracie ordered Linguine with clams and mussels in white sauce. Ms. Fabulous ordered the seafood linguine with red sauce. Everything looked amazing. So..of course, we dug right in. Gracie’s dish was accompanied by a lemon wedge which she squeezed onto her dinner.
I tasted my seafood cannelloni. WOW! In an atmosphere like Dallimonti’s, where the decor is not over the top and the staff is down to earth, one would expect delicious, yet middle of the road tasting dishes. I was blown away by the seafood cannelloni. The pasta was tender, packed with tons of real crab meat and shrimp, topped with a lovely white seafood sauce and melted cheese. My tastebuds were dancing!
I proceeded to taste Gracie’s Linguine with mussels and clams. I don’t like mussels, so I avoided them, But I took a hearty forkful of pasta with clams and dredged it through the lovely sauce. WOW again! I have never tasted clam sauce this delicious. It was not your typical thin “white” clam sauce. The sauce had body to it. Slightly thickened, tons of fresh garlic and full of clams, I could have eaten just a bowl of the sauce as a soup. The best dish on the table!!
And of course, I had to try Ms. Fabulous’ seafood linguine. There was an ample amount of seafood tossed with her pasta in a tasty red sauce. The sauce had a nice, but not overwhelming, background taste of the seafood. The pasta was cooked al dente. Very delicious indeed.
Along with the main courses, came a platter of vegetables and penne pasta with marinara sauce. The marinara sauce was good..the right amount of seasoning, not too sweet and no weird background taste. The penne was a slightly overcooked for my taste…but then again, we all know how finicky I am too. The veggies were steamed and lightly seasoned and I enjoyed them with my seafood cannelloni.
I was not fully convinced at the beginning of the meal that the amount of food would be enough to fill K’s belly. K has a ravenous appetite and given the opportunity, could probably polish off a half dozen hamburgers at a sitting. But, at the end of the meal, everyone was full and satisfied. Our entrees ranged in price from $14.95 to $16.95. There was nothing on the menu over $17.95 and for the price, you get a lot of food. Soup, salad, bread, main course and dessert. Not bad at all.
When it came time to order dessert, we were offered a choice of vanilla ice cream, bread pudding or spumoni. 3 spumoni’s and 1 bread pudding (for K because he HAS to be different). Oh yeah, and 4 coffees(which is not included in the price and is $2.50 per cup..a bit pricey, but I can see the justification for it as one does get a terrific value with the price of the meal). The dessert was small and just enough, which seemed to be the trend throughout the meal…there was “just enough” of everything we were served.
The total with tax, before tip, was $77.75. That works out to $19.43 per person for a 4 course meal with optional coffee. 4 courses of delicious, homemade food, very fairly priced. When we were leaving, I had a chat with the original hostess that seated us and talked to her about my background as a chef, an Italian and a New Yorker. I told her that in the 7 years that I have lived here, I have not been able to find a decent Italian restaurant and that we would be back again, soon.
If you want fancy-shmancey, Dallimonti’s may not be your kind of place. There are plenty of other restaurants in the Bay Area that will give you fancy food at fancy prices, which to me is NOT a good value at all, especially with their stiff and cold decor. But..if you want cozy, homey, warmth and good Italian food at a very reasonable price, then you MUST head over to Dallimonti’s. Take your time, spend some time with people you care about, enjoy a lovely meal together and have some laughs…because when you are at Dallimonti’s, you feel like you’re at home.
Until next time…Buon Appetito!
Restaurant type: Italian 10/10, Overall 9/10
Posted by John D 
