Please note that since writing this blog post, Cantinetta has closed down
Last week, I wrote a rather dismal post about places that have fallen victim to the recession. As if in confirmation of my fears, yesterday I read in the news that February 2013 saw the highest number of businesses going bankrupt in one month since records began. It made for pretty depressing reading…
But the silver lining to all this, I suppose, is that all those empty spaces don’t seem to stay empty for long. A wander down De Clercqstraat in search of dinner on Saturday night revealed at least four restaurants I’d never seen before in the space of 100 metres. Some of them were already so packed they didn’t have a table for us. One that did, however, was Cantinetta, whose signage told us everything we needed to know: “Wine & Pasta”.
Through a chat with the owner, we discovered that Cantinetta is run by two women with a passion for Italian farm-to-fork cooking. I had linguine con vongole: the pasta was fresh, the tomatoes sweet (despite it being early March!) and the clams plentiful. My chef friend also reported fresh cod, cooked well and flavoured delicately. The mozzarella with pizza dough wasn’t as buffalo-rich as it could have been, and the dough was more pita than pizza (thick and stodgy, rather than thin and crispy) but the salty rosemary flavours were good.
While the good intentions on the “pasta” side of the offering were clear, the teething problems with the “wine” side were equally evident. The wine list was short, and yet weirdly confusing. Some wines seemed only to be available by the glass, some by the “line” (which sounded alarmingly like coke but turned out to mean per 150 ml), and some by the bottle. It would have been simpler to offer fewer wines, but all of them by the glass, carafe or bottle. Not being the type to hold back when it comes to vino, we ordered a bottle of Italian white. It was crisp and dry and needed to be cold, but the restaurant didn’t appear to own a cooler. When we asked for one, we were brought a shallow bowl containing a tea towel and iced water. Needless to say, it didn’t really work, and the table ended up rather wet! Since most of the dinner guests were drinking a single bottle of wine between two over the course of an evening, a few wine coolers would have made a small but wise investment.
Given that the owner we spoke to was fresh out of college, it’s not surprising that a few issues need to be ironed out – and hopefully will be over the next month or so. At that point, I’ll be going back to Cantinetta – let’s just hope it’s still there…
