Good-looking Italian food with disappointing flavors

By Matthew Gray
Advertiser Restaurant Critic

The cozze e vongole alla marinara, left foreground, an appetizer of sautéed mussels and clams, looked alluring on the plate but made a rather ordinary gustatory impression. Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser Caffe Latte 339 Saratoga Road, second floor 924-1414 Dinner: 6:30-9 p.m. daily except Tuesdays Mediocre

It's the sort of hidden-away spot where you'd expect to get a great meal. Caffe Latte offers a fixed price, three-course menu that includes an appetizer, soup or salad, and main course for $35 per person ($40 for meat main courses), not including drinks and dessert. You can choose specific dishes to customize the three courses; most other fixed-price menus do not give customers as many choices. Another note about pricing here: The menu states, "No gratuity, please" — a mixed blessing. It eliminates an expense but also offers less incentive for the waiter.

The first of the appetizers was sautéed mussels and clams in marinara sauce (cozze e vongole alla marinara on the menu), which proved to be an ordinary dish with rather underwhelming flavor. Polenta in butter and sage cream sauce ("polenta monte bianco") sounded unusual and worth a try. The polenta's creamy texture was just right, but once again, the flavors were on holiday.

We opted for the salad instead of soup and received two small plates with nice mixed greens and two wedges of what resembled tomato — white, yellow and green, rock-hard pieces, flavorless and totally unacceptable. To make matters worse, the dressing tasted almost completely of oil. The capper was when salt and pepper shakers arrived along with the salad with nary an offer of fresh-cracked pepper.

The third course includes your choice of pasta-type dishes — gnocchi, risotto, ravioli, spaghetti and such, with a few veal dishes ($5 extra). In Italy, pasta, risotto and such are generally eaten as a separate course before the meat or fish course; we wondered why these weren't offered as a third course, with entree to follow, to be more in line with that country's custom.

I ordered the veal with mushrooms (scaloppini funghi) and found the cutlet very thin, chewy and tough, although the sauce tasted nice, taking flavor from porcini mushrooms. It was teamed with a solitary sliced white potato and a small mound of salad greens. The other main course was spaghetti carbonara, an insipid attempt at a classic dish of pancetta (unsmoked bacon), Reggiano Parmigiano (or Pecorino Romano) cheese, and eggs. Once again, absolutely nothing was used to garnish or add color to this plate of very dry pasta.

Desserts were expensive and equally unimpressive.

Although $35 isn't a lot of money for a three-course meal, it's not inexpensive, either. For this price, it's reasonable to expect a certain level of ambience, service, presentation and food quality. Our waiter was friendly and gave us adequate service. However, he was wearing blue jeans — inappropriate in such an establishment. Only two wines are available by the glass ($7.50), a chardonnay and a sangiovese.

Perhaps most importantly, the food did not live up to expectations on either of two visits.

Reach Matthew Gray at mgray@honoluluadvertiser.com.