DiVino Wine Studio
225 Preston St., 613-221-9760, divinowinestudio.com
Open: Tuesday to Thursday 5 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., 5 to 11 p.m., Closed Sunday and Monday
Prices: pastas $12 to $26, mains $24 to $52
Access: small ramp to front door
At DiVino Wine Studio on Preston Street, the bottles get top billing. But we were curious about the food.
When the Little Italy business opened more than eight years ago, it was more like a wine bar with a mission. In May 2008, its original owner, sommelier Antonio Mauriello, told the Citizen: “My concept for DiVino is to educate my customers on a variety of wine and food culture in Italy, while they are having a good glass of wine paired with an antipasto.”
A few months later, my predecessor weighed in with a mixed review. “There were more disappointments from the kitchen than pleasures,” Anne DesBrisay wrote. She also thought that dishes, and five-ounce glasses of wine, were often over-priced.
Since then, there have been changes at DiVino. Its owner and sommelier is Eric Diotte. DiVino’s website says its chef since June 2011 has been Rome-born Cristian Lepore, but I’m told that Lepore returned to Italy several months ago. Lucas Marshall, who worked with Lepore since April 2014, has taken over.
It was time, I thought last month, to give the place a go.
I liked the feel of DiVino. Its spacious, 60-seat, main dining room is a long, colourful, engaging space with bulky wood tables and chairs. An open kitchen, perhaps the most open in Ottawa, is a focal point, and two long high tables with stools afford the best views of chefs on the job. On the back wall, scenes from Italy are projected. In the back, there’s a private, 25-seat dining room. Both rooms are available for rental, and true to its original mission, DiVino still holds special events; Upcoming are a Tuscan-themed dinner on Jan. 12, and, on Wednesdays in January, four-course, cocktail-and-food dinners featuring liquors from Ottawa distillery North of 7.
DiVino’s usual nightly menu is compact, consisting of not even two dozen items, including aperitivi (snacks), antipasti (appetizers), primi (pastas) and secondi (meat dishes). Over two dinners, I sampled roughly half of the menu’s dishes, and like DesBrisay, found a mix of winners and losers.
I also thought some prices were too high, although these days, five-ounce glasses of wine are more affordable. (That said, to my surprise, there was no producer information given for wines by the glass as there are for the other wines on the exclusively Italian list.)
DiVino offered some smaller signature items that were worth re-ordering.
Hefty olives all’ascolana ($3 each) — plump olives in a breaded, fried coating of nicely seasoned sausage meat — jump-started our appetites nicely. We thought quite highly too of DiVino’s version of scamorza in padella ($10), a complexly flavoured, sweet-salty-smoky mix of seared smoked scamorza cheese, apples poached in molasses and prosciutto.
Beef tartare ($17) was reasonably well made, and we appreciated its caramelized onion jam and artichoke purée, if not quite as much its too-crisp crostini.
Likeable enough was the plate of three scallops ($18) on an eggplant purée, flanked by a quenelle of sweetened compound butter and garnished with prosciutto. The scallops, while not overcooked, would have been nicer still with a harder sear.
The big letdown among the starters was the fried cuttlefish ($12). Despite being cooked sous-vide before being fried, the seafood pieces were too often overly chewy, and not that tasty.
Among the starchier primi dishes, the clear favourite was the comforting and somewhat soupy mushroom risotto ($26), which had good depth of flavour. Gnocchi ($17) were texturally fine, but their mild gorgonzola cream sauce could have been punchier. Briny octopus fettuccine ($18) lacked finesse and its bits of octopus were too chewy and missed out on goodness from the grill.
Many of the dishes above had been recommended by a server. So, too, was the so-called “meat board,” the restaurant’s ($52) deluxe sharing platter for carnivores. It yielded deboned short rib meat and morsels of pork belly — each of those meats were also available on its own — plus slices of seared duck breast and sautéed vegetables.
Three of us made pretty quick work of the meat board, although we differed on which meat was tops. The pork belly, which has a nice seared exterior and a yielding interior, won me over, while another sang the duck breast’s praises, even if I thought it a touch overdone and needed the sparkle of some finishing salt. The short rib meat had definitely seen more moist moments, and on the whole, the sauces and glazes applied to everything on the board skewed to the sweet side.
Our $9 desserts, a small glass of chocolate mousse and three profiteroles, were enjoyable but skimpily sized.
Service was always friendly, but on our second visit, the server was more attentive and proactive in discussing the food.
Both servers were also generous in serving warm, dense bread sliced à la minute for dipping in peppery olive oil. Had all the food been as good as that bread, I’d be all in with my praise for DiVino. But given the unevenness I experienced, I have to recommend that if you go, you pick and choose wisely.
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