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Review Il Sogno DiVino brings a little Italy to Little Italy By Romina Cleary November 14, 2005 Little Italy--This past weekend my friend and I visited Il Sogno DiVino, a new trattoria in Little Italy. My friend, a health-conscious woman with epicurean tastes and I, an Italian-American well familiar with Mediterranean cuisine, craved a sophisticated yet unassuming lunch menu alfresco. Quick note: A trattoria is an informal restaurant or tavern serving simple Italian dishes and wine. Alfresco means outside, and fresco translated literally means fresh. So, lunch alfresco means lunch in the fresh air.For two health-conscious and picky women, it’s difficult to find the right place to eat.
Roppongi was dead, George’s isn’t all that laid back, we are sick of George’s, and the menu at Brockton Villa didn’t have the healthy fare we were looking for. We dropped by a few places with potential but they were either closed, too quiet, or too shady (literally). By 2 p.m. we decided to drive down to Little Italy to see if that part of town could offer us something more. Within a few moments of stepping onto India Street, Il Sogno DiVino sang our song. Quick Note: Il Sogno DiVino means a dream of wine, but it if you merge the “Di” with “Vino” you get divine. So, it’s a play on words. Perhaps the food and deserts are just divine, and the dream is mostly about the wine. At Il Sogno DiVino we found attractive an international-looking wait staff and clientele in their 20s and 30s. Customers hung out on the front patio sipping their wine or beer and sampling soup, panini, and salad. Quick note: Panini is plural for panino. In Italy a panino is a sandwich. Walking into a café in Rome and saying you want a panino with cheese would be the same thing as visiting a deli in New York and asking for a sandwich with cheese. The patio was full except for a small table for two in the corner, right next to a black railing. We squeezed past a group of five and sat next to a young couple enjoying soup and panini. We were greeted and seated by Fabiano, a handsome Brazilian with an Italian look. He handed us our menus and brought us glasses of water. Quick Note: I noticed that a lot of South Americans work at Italian restaurants in San Diego. I’ve come across many Brazilians, a woman from Uruguay, and a few others from Argentina and Venezuela. In any case, Italians are everywhere and many Italians have moved to South America. Fabiano told me his mother is Italian and his father is Portuguese, so there. The menu felt and looked like an antique book with a bronze cover oxidized by the humidity and salt of a coastal Mediterranean town. The restaurant sported the look of a wine cellar in the heart of a countryside village somewhere along the Amalfi coast of Italy. Quick Note: Fabiano informed us that the owner of Il Sogno DiVino is originally from Salerno, a town close to Naples and known for its rustic charm. I’ve never been to Salerno, but I did visit the neighboring towns of Positano, Sorrento, and Seiano. The area boasted beautiful hillsides with views of the rocky coast, simple healthy fare, amazing seafood, and many majestic stone homes. The menu read like a book. Inside, we found two full pages of wine and 12 different kinds of beer (including Monty Python Holy Grail Ale of England). It dedicated a page to panini, and listed several Italian dishes, such as a seafood risotto. For desert, the menu offered tiramisu and a flourless chocolate cake. And if you aren’t sated after your meal, there’s a page for the restaurant’s mini market, where it’s possible to buy a pound of imported Salami, a bottle of olive oil, and a case of wine. Quick note: A risotto is an Italian rice (Riso means rice) dish where the ingredients and their flavors are slowly cooked into the rice. Fabiano returned to our table, answered questions about the menu, and very patiently awaited our order. Because of the wide selection of healthy tastes listed on the menu, it wasn’t easy to make a decision. There are more than enough choices for the health-conscious food snob at Il Sogno DiVino. We ordered four appetizers for our meal: the eggplant wrap for $9, the Hawaiian ahi poke ($12), the red and golden beet carpaccio ($6), and the heirloom tomatoes with raw Portobello mushroom and goat cheese ($9). Not really knowing anything about wine, we ordered a $15 half carafe of “Hoya de Cadenas” reserva Tempranillo of Spain. The prices for the half carafes ranged from the lowest, at $13, to the highest at $38. We picked the “Hoya” mostly for the price and its name, but also for its description: earthy, old world style, medium body, spicy, with strawberry notes. Fabiano brought us our wine with the first two appetizers, the beets and the eggplant wraps. We needed a bigger table! The red and golden beet carpaccio came on a long rectangular platter that covered the entire width of the table. Finely sliced red and yellow beets lined the perimeter of the platter while chunks of mild goat cheese, greens, mini red onions, and freshly baked pieces of Italian bread filled the middle. The beets were tasty and the red onions added that extra touch to make the dish extra flavorful. Quick note: Carpaccio is most commonly known as finely sliced pieces of raw beef or fish seasoned with a light sauce. For the California vegetarian crowd, beet carpaccio would work just as well. The eggplant wraps came on a smaller dish and were interesting. The eggplant was raw and thinly sliced, wrapped around tomato and mozzarella, and presented on a dish of greens. I liked the idea of the wraps, but this dish wasn’t my favorite, not as tasty as the beets. The Ahi Poke Tuna came in a tall martini glass and was seasoned with a light sauce that tasted of balsamic with an Asian twist. Quick note: I’ve never eaten Ahi Poke tuna at an Italian restaurant, but hey, I liked it. The heirloom tomatoes were piled one on top of the other, over a very very tastily seasoned Portobello mushroom. The tomatoes tasted about as expected, but the mushroom was something else…juicy, savory, and smooth. Quick note: I had no idea what an “heirloom” tomato was. What we got were thick slices of a red and a yellow tomato. Apparently, heirloom tomatoes are tomatoes of a variety of colors, i.e., green, purple, purple-and-yellow, red, red-and-green. To say “tomato” in Italian is to say pomodoro, which, when taken apart, means “golden apple.” By the time we finished the four dishes in addition to the fresh Italian bread they came with, we were full. However, because the wine was so good and we hadn’t finished it, we had to top the meal off with a desert. Fabiano suggested the flourless chocolate cake. Certainly a rich desert made with almond paste instead of flour, the nutty chocolate cake went well with our last drops of wine. Il Sogno di Vino has been open for six weeks. It’s a relaxing and unassuming place with ambiance. Friends can stop by on a Saturday afternoon to eat well, enjoy the sunshine, hang out, talk for a while over a glass of wine, and forget about rushing around. I felt as though I was sitting at a café on the outskirts or a large Italian city. We chatted with the wait staff, sat at our table for at least a half hour after finishing our meal, and just plain enjoyed ourselves. Il Sogno DiVino 1607 India St. San Diego, CA 619.531.8887 More Vyuz restaurant reviews... McP's shows different side to special ops | By Larry Knowles Go to Casa de Reyes with a significant other, a date, or your parents | By Larry Knowles Lively cadence beats at El Rincon Del Taco | By Larry Knowles Hit Harar for authentic Ethiopian food, hamburgers | By Larry Knowles At Fugu's, good sushi comes on the cheap | By Larry Knowles |
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