Worth The Drive: Enoteca Sociale

Enoteca Sociale
Address: 1288 Dundas Street W, Toronto
Open: Daily at 5 p.m.
Cost: Dinner for two with a couple of courses is about $100 (before wine)
Contact: 416-534-1200; mail@sociale.ca
Reservations recommended

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For me, it’s always worth a drive to the neighbourhood around Ossington and Dundas Street (or as my Sicilian Nonna called it: “Doon-a-das”). Travelling in there, you might pass over Manning Avenue, a childhood street of my father’s; that for me stimulates a stream of memory and recollection and nothing stokes it better than good food.

With Enoteca Sociale, Rocco Agostino has certainly hit a new and delicious standard for simple and “real” Italian food. That much is apparent from the way magazines and newspapers have gushed over what the restaurant does, and has been doing,  over the past year or so: it has been touted as one of the best new restaurants in the country.

Based on a couple of visits and a tasting of a dozen or so dishes, I can see why Enoteca deserves those accolades. And in an always changing and evolving industry it doesn’t appear to have lost its lustre–or quality–one little bit.

The menu is divided into antipasti, secondi, pastas, contorni (“sides”), a beef dish, and sweets and cheeses. I’d say it is a glorious Italian feast.

I’ve enjoyed Enoteca’s bacala fritters and a nicely salty, nicely acidic mozzarella and anchovy app that have featured Prince Edward County tomatoes.

Mozzarella and anchovy.

Then, as well, a quick dash into Rome–very much the flavour and style of Enoteca–brings an excellent preparation of tripe–trippa–that gets the most out of the offal without knocking you into the barnyard with aroma. If you’ve had tripe at a dim sum place, well, this ain’t it.

The stomach is gently bathed in water to remove some of the strongest aromas and is cooked with aromatics and a bit of vinegar, like the French Caen preparation, before settling into a lovely tomato ragu that has a sweetish base flavouring against which the kitchen accents with a bit of chili heat and some pecorino and mint. The tripe is soft and tender and scrumptious.

The latter herb caught my palate for more than flavour: I remember my Nonna (Concetta Scime) using mint in a lot of her cooking, especially as she got older (she lived to be 103!) and found it hard to identify flavours. The trippa was served with an at once crispy and creamy polenta which offered a neutrality for some of the dish’s more heightened flavours.

The manicotti, when on the menu, can be very good if almost too rich. Uptown 21 chef Nick Benninger, with whom I’m dining ce soir, loved the bowl of orecchietti with the beautiful bitterness of rapini and some anchovies with just hint of lemon and pepper. Rapini can have a tenacious, rapacious bitterness that needs a bit of lively lemony acid to fend it off–that job is done well here.

As big T would say over there in Jersey, "the manigot."

Grilled octopus has perfect texture and is set off lusciously with that pleasingly tart and bitter rapini, and all of that is softened by the subtlety of fingerling potatoes–cooked in a way my Nonna never could. Sorry Nonna.

I've had the octopus with either rapini or chard: delicious either way.

Sweetbreads–a dish I recall dad lovingly soaking and preparing for an evening meal at home–are exceedingly good. Benninger of Uptown 21 agreed. We both liked the balance of a slight bit of crisp to the morsels which yielded easily to a creamy warm interior and a slight tang that was delicious. I might have wanted, if I have to be slightly picky, just a tad bit more salt to push the sweetbreads from extraordinary to spectacular. But no matter.

A few fritters.

The small-to-medium portion sizes and prices are coordinated well enough at Enoteca that you can sample several dishes in a sitting (there are, however, 42-ounces of bone-in ribeye with porcini for about $50 if you want a longer lasting “taste,” or to share with others). And you should–you really should–sample multiple dishes here.

Spaghetti cacio e pepe is a peppery al dente bowl of pasta which in its texture and flavour is just about perfect: the simplicity of the dish is the remarkable thing. A previous carbonara version of the dish I’ve had is equally good and is given the added juicy richness of some pork.

Pasta carbonara is rich yet not too heavy.

Agostino’s flank steak appears with a balance of grilled, caramelized exterior and a soft, warm interior. Tonight’s version is served with sauteed and delicately and deliciously charred Brussels sprouts. The meat was borderline rare and may have just needed a few minutes longer cooking, though the slices were terrific. On a previous visit, the sprouts appeared as well–it is obviously a flavour version which works well.

Flank steak and Brussels sprouts.

We also spotted ravioli di cervello–lamb’s brains–at the bottom of the six-item pasta menu and on a blackboard. Six or so large ravioli arrive lightly peppered and “offally good” with a creamy, sweetish filling. There is something, well, contemplative about eating another creature’s brain, even in this day-and-age of whole beast eating. I was quiet and thoughtful while eating these ravioli, and I’m not quite sure why. I do know I enjoyed them very much however.

In all the heady aromas and flavours, I’ve forgotten the precise names of the cheeses we sampled from Enoteca’s cave: I think Robiola, a sweet Gorgy dolce, and an absolutely knock-the-back-of-your-head-off Moliterno, an 18-month aged Sicilian jacked on a stellar black truffle paste. Wow.

Luscious, bold cheeses ... the names of which I don't even remember now.

Having tucked into a good portion of the menu on a couple of occasions, Enoteca Sociale prepares simple Italian food and very well. I don’t think in any dish was a single ingredient too heavy-handed, nor nary a single spice running rogue on the plate. There’s a controlled and deft hand managing the orchestration of the few simple ingredients to build a dish that packs a subtle, nuanced and complex taste.

The restaurant design and ambiance says easy and comfortable wine bar, a good and interesting selection of bottles and pours and a funky-cool Enomatic wine preservation system which “reseals” a very expensive bottle of wine with an inert nitrogen that allows you to sample sips without a whole-bottle purchase.

There’s a communal aspect to the place–explained in part, no doubt, but the “sociale” function of wine-making and shared tastings in a neighbourhood, as well as a few communal tables for six. I love that element.

We sat at the bar, however, having dropped in without a reservation, and worked with the amiable and knowledgeable (and very, very tall) gentleman there to put together a deliciously solid meal that represented a good cross-section of what Enoteca Sociale can do–and why it warrants the accolades giving it such lofty placement in Toronto’s, and indeed Canada’s restaurant pantheon. Yet, I doubt they care (though I know they must be pleased) because what they strive for at Enoteca is so simple and real that nothing else really matters outside of that.