Caro Amico

I likes me some Italian food. The problem is that I haven't found a great many decent places in town for good Italian grub. Most places seem to go with a "more is better" mentality that doesn't always pan out.

We've covered Italian in the past here. Looking at the list of restaurants that have made the list, the only really noteworthy ones are the fairly expensive ones. Pastini Pasteria is actually pretty good, but otherwise there's really a lot of schlock out there.

We've also covered Caro Amico before, but that was related to their pizzas. We haven't had a sit-down meal there for awhile.

Which is part of what excited me about Wednesday. For Father's Day, we took my father-in-law to Caro Amico, which is one of his favorite old haunts. Unfortunately, we took my kids as well, which made it hard to really enjoy the atmosphere or to really get into the food. This review will suffer on that account.

The view from Caro Amico is nice. We were on the middle floor, which has a deck/patio area overlooking the sloping west side down to the river.



The third floor has a better view, but there was a private party up there and I didn't wish to disturb them to get you a photo.

I've recently been trying to count calories somewhat (believe-it-or-not, considering my lunch at BrunchBox today), so I tried to avoid pasta for dinner and stick with something a little less carb-o-riffic.

My wife and I split a chopped salad as an appetizer. Delicious. A green salad with a nice light vinaigrette, it also had bits of salami, olives, and provolone cheese. The full salad could easily feed three, and we left part of it untouched.

For dinner I went with the Steak Marsala. This isn't in my normal wheelhouse, since I generally like to stick with more traditional pasta dishes, but traditional pasta didn't fit as well into my current dietary scheme.

My dish was a flat-iron steak topped with mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes and garlic in a marsala sauch. It was served with some penne pasta in marinara, which I did take a couple of bites of.



(Sorry for how dark the picture is; my wife gets bent when I get all food-bloggy on her).

The meal ended up being very satisfying, even leaving half the pasta aside. The steak was well-prepared, and the flavors worked well together without any being over-powering. I drank a Lagunitas IPA with my meal, and it was fabulous.

For four adults and two kids the tab was about $112 (pre-tip), which wasn't too bad. Service was great, atmosphere was nice (to the extent that I could enjoy it); I'd continue to say that Caro Amico is among the top Italian places in town.