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The Santa Fe Mexican:
Every town needs a restaurant it loves to love. And for us, here in
Santa Fe, its Pranzo.
So how do we love it? Let me count the ways.
The food is always very good, arcing up to excellent; the prices, eminently
fair. The wine list, all Italian, is full of pleasant discoveries, and
even when the joint is packed, the service is attentive and actually
cheerful. We are looking at the Honorary Leonardo Da Vinci Award for
that single-most difficult triumph in the restaurant world: being as
good as you can be every time.
Now dont think that I come to this out of knee-jerk Italian-food adoration.
The needle on my food-longings meter tends to boing between anything
with green chile to everything Asian to Greek to cheeseburgers to anything
that goes baaaaaaa or lately swam in the ocean or involves cheese and
hence does not automatically zip over to pasta. When Santa Fe food trends
suddenly gifted us with umpteen Italian places and still no decent Thai
food, I, for one, was not ecstatic.
Over the years, Pranzo has won even my heart. There have been many good
incarnations of Pranzo, as the wheel of chefs turned, but the present
one, under Jeff Copeland, may be the best yet, with kitchen staff and
table service the finest in years.
We began with an order of Cozze ai Ferre , $7.25, a heavenly bowl of
plump, oven-roasted mussels luxuriating in a garlicky broth of butter,
wine and fresh herbs. This being fairly perfect, we added a second antipasto
of succulent, grilled polenta swaddled in mushroom ragu and lavished
with melted camazola cheese, $7.95. Pleasure off the scale both plates
arrived steaming.
The individual pizzas tempted, as did the evening special, a grilled
ahi tuna with winter greens: We learned its best to reserve the special
as soon as you hear it described it tends to sell out quickly. Same
advice for the rotisserie chicken, a hugely popular dish. I went with
the osso buco, $17.95, prepared with lamb rather than veal, which was
nearly the Platonic ideal of this dish: the meat full-flavored, yet
fall- apart tender, the pan juices rich as a childhood fantasy of gravy,
with bright lemon notes and vivid, greeny hints of fresh parsley, sided
by saffron risotto. Our second entre was the cioppino, $10.95, a soul-satisfying
version of fishermans stew, laden with the central triumvirate of scallops,
shrimp and squid,with generous additions of whatever is fresh and available:
delicious chunks of sweet mahi mahi or tuna or halibut, in a sauce bright
with basil, tomatoes and bell peppers.
