...I think you can at Assaggio. This restaurant, set in Boston's version of Little Italy called the North End wasn't good or bad. Just forgettable.
Since my boyfriend and I started seeing each other, around this time last year, I have visited him in Boston six times and on each visit we go out to dinner in the North End and then to Mike's Pastry (a blissfully, deliciously orgasmic experience of cannoli). There have been very good and very bad and on this occasion, very forgettable.
Perhaps we should have been suspicious when we called to make a reservation for Saturday night the same afternoon and had no problem getting our requested time. Usually we have to eat at some absurdly late hour just to get a table. Not so at Assaggio.
The dining room was small, but not terribly cramped. We were seated promptly and service was pretty good throughout the night. The decor is mostly mural-based: think fat baby cherubs, Corinthian columns and astrological signs on the ceiling. My boyfriend found this questionable.
We started with an appetizer of calamari...which was $10. I'm sorry, but when did fried squid get so fucking expensive? Everywhere else I see calamari it's like, $8 tops. I think we were taken for a ride. They did give us a hefty serving of it but it was only warm and I prefer my food somewhere around 'lowest level of Hell' hot. Whatever, it was good enough.
Tommy, my boyfriend, (he will be referred to by name from now on, much to his displeasure I assume. Sorry babe.) ordered cheese ravioli like he always does. Seriously, it's not like the boy has a timid palate. He once ate unidentifiable seafood substance in a restaurant where we were the only native English speakers (another story) but he only orders cheese ravioli when we go out to dinner at an Italian place. Go figure. Anyway, he ordered that and I ordered grilled swordfish that was supposed to come with shallots, capers and a white wine butter sauce.
Anyone who knows me also knows that my stomach is evil and will not allow me to eat anything that tastes good. This means things with heavy cream, butter, oil, fried foods, the list goes on and on. Don't tell me how sorry you are for me and how badly my life sucks, I already know. So shut up. My waitress assured me that I could get the fish without the butter sauce and I was happy. I like capers. They taste like seawater and I find that appetizing.
We get our meals about 15 minutes after they take the calamari away which I thought was good. It wasn't so long that I was tempted to go all 'where the fuck is my food, garcon?' but not so quickly that I felt rushed. Tommy got five ravioli and I got a plain piece of grilled swordfish (no capers or shallots?!) with mashed potatoes and sauteed spinach.
Let me say here that five ravioli is not enough for Tommy. Aside from being a boy, he is also an athlete which means that he eats more than seven of me put together. My portion: huge. His portion: pitiful. We should have traded.
I tried a bite of his ravioli. They were fine, nothing to write home about, but the marinara sauce was pretty good. Nice and velvety. Then again, marinara sauce is hard to fuck up.
My dinner was fucking boring. I said no butter sauce, not no flavoring. The mashed potatoes (which I obviously couldn't eat being that the main ingredients are potatoes, butter and cream) were oddly runny which was unappealing. The sauteed spinach was tasty though and not drowned in oil as so many vegetables are nowadays. The piece of swordfish they gave me was a good one, and nicely cooked but that does not make up for the fact that there was just no flavor to it. That's crap.
Anyway, dinner after that point was unremarkable. Tommy finished most of the rest of my dinner (there were about two servings of fish and spinach on my plate) and we paid and left. It was moderately priced which was nice.
Final thoughts: it wasn't disappointing enough to be bad but it wasn't great enough to be good. It was just another Italian restaurant with astrological signs painted on the ceiling and reasonably good marinara sauce. One to forget.
3 (dim) stars
http://www.assaggioboston.com/
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