Mother had brought along a suitcase full of food: veal schnitzels, fried chicken, spinach pie, even a custard cake.
I wanted the full Italian experience: salad of veal tongue with celery and tuna sauce; selection of seafood ravioli with bottarga (dried tuna roe); stewed belly pork with radicchio, saffron mash and red wine sauce; and then cheese.
The new premises held promise, although the menu was less reassuring, full of old standbys like veal Marsala and grilled chicken Dijon.
Certainly the diners there know that Avanti Ristorante Italiano is a good find, a place to eat chicken or veal a dozen different ways, to choose from a board full of specials (more chicken and veal, but some seafood, pork and pastas, too), and to leave happy enough that the restaurant goes on the "If I'm in Pennington and hungry" list.
The menu was full of similarly intriguing combinations, like veal sweetbread with potatoes and, as described by the menu (in translation), "coffee flavors".
The menu was full of similarly intriguing combinations, like veal sweetbread with potatoes and, as described by the menu (in translation), "coffee flavors". However, the single best knock-me-out dish was the purée accompanying a silky filet of John Dory.
He doesn't clamor, you know?" The restaurant's menu is full of many of the same veal-parm-and-fresh-mozzarella fixtures that the achingly hip Torrisi Italian Specialties, a few steps away on Mulberry Street, has been lauded for rediscovering.
You may have heard of confined veal calves pumped full of antibiotics and collapsing in their own excrement; or seen the video of bushels of baby chicks, alive and cheeping, dumped into a grinder.
Sauces like the fig, prosciutto and Marsala glaze on the medallions of veal, or the port reduction on the Hudson Valley chicken breast, are light and full of flavor.
