Noturo

When I wanted a full meal but didn't feel like cooking last week I decided to give Noturo a shot. It's a little Italian place around the corner from my apartment where I always saw families or older couples when I spied through the windows on my walk back from the grocery store. Since Italian is the kind of food best eaten when surrounded by family, I took this as a good sign.

Pasta is something I love to cook so I don't usually order it out and if I do it needs to be a combination if ingredients I don't usually make. The item that best fit that description was the capellini rucola salmone: angel hair pasta with arugula and salmon in a light pink sauce. I have to commend Noturo on two things: 1) for $16 you really get a full serving if salmon and 2) the pink sauce really was light. Usually when a restaurant offers a light cream sauce there's nothing light about it. In this case there was a lot of sauce but it wasn't this thick mess that took over the angel hair. The one thing it could have used was a bit more of the arugula. The peppery green gave the dish the depth of flavor it needed to set this restaurant apart from other common red sauce Italian places. I know there's a fine line with arugula and too much is overkill, but just a little more would have been nice. It also needed just a bit of salt but adding the Parmesan the restaurant included with my order on the side did the trick. Since I had a 20% off coupon through Seamless, I decided to go crazy and order a caprese salad to start. Maybe you and I have different definitions of crazy. As long as you have good tomatoes for this dish, you're good do I was happy, especially when I saw that they three a couple good olives in there on the side. The Italian dinner experience was complete with one final thing. On the side, they sent some sliced bread. Other than the fact that I like to make my own pasta dishes the main reason I don't order from Italian restaurants is because then you miss out on the bread that's always on the table. I love covering it bread or dipping it in olive oil and maybe using it to sweep up some extra sauce on my plate. I'm glade Noturo recognized it as an integral part of the meal, even for those not dining in the restaurant.  

This is a standard Italian restaurant, one like every neighborhood needs. It's not necessarily a standout and it's about $5 too expensive to become a true regular in my takeout rotation, but it's perfect for a Friday night that I want to stay in but still feel like a real person by eating a meal that doesn't feel at all like delivery. Since I'm not spending money on alcohol in this scenario I can totally justify the extra couple dollars.