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Italian restaurant is worth a trip to New Stanton Friday, July 10, 1998 By Woodene Merriman, Post-Gazette Dining Critic
Lou Guerrieri says his customers come from Belle Vernon, Connellsville, Greensburg. . . the list goes on and on, covering towns for miles around New Stanton. But Pittsburgh? "Very few from Pittsburgh," he says. "It's hard to bring Pittsburghers out here, but we go into Pittsburgh all the time."
Indeed he does. One night in the middle of each week, for example, he closes up late after all the customers are gone, and heads for Pittsburgh's Strip District to pick out his own fresh vegetables. The sun is up by the time he gets back to New Stanton.
But Guerrieri is a believer in fresh ingredients, and willing to do what it takes to get them. On Friday and Saturday nights he features fresh fish - the kind depends on what he thought was best from the Strip.
That was oysters, Chilean sea bass and salmon one Friday night when His Honor and I were at Guerrieri's restaurant, La Tavola. The oysters were offered a couple of ways, but we chose the old familiar oysters Rockefeller appetizer. Actually, they weren't old familiar. The oysters Rockefeller had a generous layer of bechamel sauce with cheese, spinach and bacon on top. Alas, the sauce was so generous it overwhelmed the oysters.
The Chilean sea bass, wrapped in proscuitto and served with a creamy basil sauce, had an Italian touch. The salmon came with a citrus glaze and skinny curls of orange zest on top. Guerrieri had found some fine snow peas on his trip to the Strip. They were lightly cooked, and added a little crunch and bright color to the plate
For Pittsburghers, La Tavola Ristorante is worth the drive to New Stanton. It's as good as many city restaurants, and better than a great many of them. Executives from the nearby Sony, Robert Shaw, UPS and various pharmaceutical offices already know that. They're among the restaurant's regular customers, and the Guerrieri caters events at their plants.
Lou Guerrieri was 17 when he left Italy and came to America. But it wasn't until he was 26 that he decided to be a chef. He was certified in Washington, D.C., in 1985, then honed his skills at a couple of smaller places in Greensburg before opening La Tavola in 1991 with his wife, Sherry.
At first he worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week doing almost everything himself. Now he has Jim Bellone as chef, and Guerrieri makes up the menu and the sauces. He also takes time at lunch and at dinner to walk through the restaurant, stopping at all the tables to chat a little. If you order one of the dessert specialties, bananas foster, Guerrieri makes it for you himself, right at table side.
At dinner, the menu is big - some 40 entrees. Veal dishes, like veal piccata (with lemon and capers) and veal florentine (with spinach, lump crab meat and bechamel sauce), are big favorites. All the pasta preparations you expect at an Italian restaurant are there, along with some unusual ones, like pasta pomodoro gambretti, or sauteed shrimp, asparagus and roma tomatoes in a lemon scampi sauce over angel hair, and scallops Dipate, or sauteed scallops with a creamy sherry wine sauce, topped with roma tomatoes and stilton cheese over fettucini.
The wine list is not big, but appropriate for an Italian restaurant. It's a good place to try an Italian wine you've never had before, such as the light, crisp 1995 Fazi-Battaglia Castelpanio verdicchio ($24).
There's a lot to like about La Tavola Ristorante. Like the sign posted low on the hostess' desk: "Proper Dress Required. Gentlemen Please Remove Your Hat." (H.H. is much too proper to wear his baseball cap to dinner, of course, but I'm sure you've noticed how many men do. They should be reported to Miss Manners.)
I like the fact that you enter directly into the non-smoking dining room. The bar and smoking dining room are on the other side of the wall, and if you're allergic, you don't have to walk through that area.
I like the double-dressed tables, even at lunch-pink cloth tablecloths on top of white cloths. I like the seafood salad, with shrimp and scallops, for lunch. OK, so it had "crab meat" that looked suspiciously like the fake stuff, but for $6.95 - and that included a cup of wedding soup and warm bread - what can you expect?
Even more I like the shrimp and crab alfredo at lunch. The sauce was not overly rich, had a lot of crab (surimi again?) flavor and shrimp on top.
I like the service. Waitresses we had were efficient, friendly and not afraid to make suggestions when asked "What's good?" I even forgive the waitress who brought large martini-shaped glasses with vanilla ice cream and long-handled parfait spoons for our bananas foster. She waited patiently while the chef melted brown sugar and butter, cut up the bananas, splashed in the rum, banana liqueur and kahlua, gave it a dash of cinnamon, and deftly tilted the pan to set it ablaze. He ladled the bananas and sauce onto the ice cream. She placed the desserts in front of us, along with the parfait spoons, and left.
Now, the question is, where do you put your spoon when you've lapped up all the dessert? On the tablecloth? We borrowed small plates from the under the cream and the bowl of grated Parmesan, and slid them under our dessert dishes. It would have been better if the dessert dishes arrived on flat plates.
The house salads at La Tavola leave me cold - literally. The plated salads apparently had been stored in the refrigerator. The greens were limp and the tomato wedges, ice cold. The salads were drowned in salad dressing. While I whined about forgetting to order the dressing on the side, H.H. pulled his usual trick. He tilted the salad plate, drained the dressing off the greens, and ate the least-wilted of the remainder.
These little complaints are nit-picking, I know. But it's little details like this that keep a very good restaurant from being a great one.
LA TAVOLA RISTORANTE
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Hours: La Tavola will reopen Monday after a week's vacation, and normal hours will resume. Monday through Thursday, 11:30 am.-10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.