La Porto A Casa
3500 Fallowfield Rd. Barrhaven Crossing, 613-843-0825
Price: Starters, $6 to $11.95; Main dishes, $15.50 to $27.95
Hours: Monday to Thursday 11 a.m.to 8 p.m., Friday 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 4 to 9 p.m., Saturday 4 to 9 p.m., closed Sunday
Access: Fully accessible
Normally, I balk at eating dinner at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. But when the early-bird special is your sole option to get into La Porto A Casa, I guess you have to take it.
I should have known not to try booking a table there on just a few days’ notice. A 2007 Citizen review of this Barrhaven mom-and-pop restaurant noted that well-planned reservations were a must. Then, the big draw was heaping plates of old-school Italian food. Now, coming up on seven years later, I wanted to find out if much at La Porto had changed and if it still satisfied.
That early dinner, plus a lunch and even some cannelloni to go, did indeed measure up. For hefty, leftover-generating helpings of vibrantly sauced pastas and the like, La Porto A Casa is definitely among the best in town.
Now, you don’t go there for trendiness, culinary or otherwise. As far as ambiance goes, the restaurant feels as much like 1975 as 2005, which is the year that it opened. The timeless stuff of stereotypes rule, from the red-and-white checkered tablecloths to the photo of Marlon Brando in The Godfather on the wall to Dean Martin and Tony Bennett crooning on the sound system.
“We take a lot of flak for our decor, but this is the way we like it,” says co-owner Caroline Rossi, who runs the front of house while her husband, Ozzie, cooks.
But if you can get past the decor, then big, traditional flavours will be your reward.
Three appetizers — lightly fried calamari ($10, shown below), small, tender smelts ($10) and meatballs in a fine spicy sauce ($7.95, also shown below) — were made with care and good attention to seasoning.
Fried Calamari at La Porto A Casa
Meatballs at La Porto A Casa
One of Rossi’s larger dishes that pleased me the most was a massive bowl of linguine pescatore ($20) that was ringed with plump mussels and impressively topped with baby shrimp, clams and crab. Even the barely sauced toothsome noodles tasted of briny goodness.
Linguine Pescatore at La Porto a Casa
Because La Porto was originally about selling take-home food (the restaurant’s name means “bring it home”), I did porto some cannelloni to my casa. Even after a 20-minute drive, the stuffed pasta was a mouth-watering winner with a deep, potent sauce, perfect pasta and unbeatable veal filling. While I could have done with a little less salt to the dish, everything that did work with it made me want to wolf it down.
Canneloni from La Porto A Casa
With these and other dishes, it seems that at La Porto, nothing is more important the sauce. Indeed, Rossi told me that her husband makes fresh batches of his sauces every morning.
The flavour punch was also big with the sausage calabrese ($20.95), a hearty serving of lean, zesty links, fresh veg and spaghetti. Straightforward simplicity can be excellent, this dish proved.
Sausage calabrese at La Porto A Casa.
Of 10 pizzas on the menu, I’ve tried just one, the “poco pazzo” pie of sopressata, asiago cheese, spicy eggplant and prosciutto. It was a little bit sloppy, but a savoury treat just the same, and the small sized rendition ($13.75) was plenty big.
Poco pazzo pizza at La Porto A Casa.
The house specialties I’ve tried were typically oversized platters of some meat (obscured by thickened sauces in various shades of brown) plus pasta (typically with tomato sauces, but also available with an oil-and-garlic sauce on demand for an extra dollar).
Of these, the pork Barolo ($23.75) stood out. The pucks of marinated tenderloin, their pinkness wrapped and made smoky by strips of bacon, were nicely grilled and bolstered with a mushroom-gravy sauce.
Pork Barolo at La Porto A Casa
Veal Fiorentina ($24.50) looked a little messy, its veal buried beneath prosciutto, spinach, mozzarella and jumbo shrimp. Better to put aside yearnings for more finesse and distinct ingredients to appreciate what was there.
Veal Fiorentina at La Porto A Casa
Osso buco ($27.95) was not bad, although the veal shank could have been a touch more tender, and my preference would have been to have a parsley-and-citrus-zest gremolata brighten the dish rather than the brown sauce that made it heavier.
Of the home-made desserts, I’ve tried the very respectable cannoli ($4.50), available only on weekends, and the whopper of a tiramisu ($5.95), adorned with chocolate sauce. Given how much food had come before it, I wouldn’t have minded a bit of restraint with that dessert.
Cannoli at La Porto A Casa
Tiramisu at La Porto A Casa
But then, holding back is not La Porto’s style, and I suspect its legions of regulars wouldn’t hear of it.
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