Portofino Ristorante Italiano

4 West Dover St., Easton, Md.
410-770-9200
Food: Italian accent
Atmosphere: Retro
Clientele: Tourists and locals
Dress: No code
Service: Uneven
Don’t miss: Cozze al vino bianco (mussels steamed with white wine); tartufo
Dinner Tariff: Dinner for two, with wine: $90 range, including tax and gratuity.
Open for dinner Tuesday-Saturday, 5:30 to 9 p.m. Reservations recommended. Major credit cards accepted. Wheelchair accessible.

Suddenly, Easton has become a culinary hot-spot. First breaking gourmet ground was Mason’s, then Restaurant Columbia, and The Inn at Easton. Now, on one of the town’s side streets sits a shy newcomer, Portofino Ristorante Italiano.

Rosario Di Pasquale, a native of Portofino, Italy, actualized a longtime dream of running his own place when he opened his restaurant in the fall of 2002. Di Pasquale, a 1973 graduate of the Genoa Hotel Management/Culinary Institute, veteran of the restaurant scene in London and New York City, and most recently a staff member at several Eastern Shore restaurants, runs the dining room like a concertmaster. He stands stationed behind a podium at one end of the room when he is not mingling with guests or helping his wait staff deliver dishes in his fifty-seat operation.

We visited about two months after the restaurant opened, and at that time Portofino definitely had its high and low points.

Lace curtains at the windows present a quaint European face to the world, while inside an oddly utilitarian décor erases that first impression. Chairs framed in black iron sit like sentinels at tables clothed in burgundy with white overlays. An unadorned brick wall contributes to the starkness of the upstairs dining room, where one longs for some lusty Italian music to warm things up a bit.

We had been sternly informed to arrive at 5:30 p.m., since the restaurant was “fully booked.” Obediently, we presented ourselves at the appointed time and were the sole customers for the first
half-hour. To many, a restaurant’s cooking aromas serve as a palate teaser, boding well for the upcoming dining experience. Not a hint of anything simmering on the stove escaped from the kitchen, as we perused the menu, sipping glasses of house wine—a pleasantly stringent Danese pinot grigio and a robust Merlot from the same vineyard.

Executive chef Arian Curcio keeps the menu short, changing it every five or six weeks. Curcio, twenty-nine, is a graduate of the Florida Culinary Institute and has cooked in restaurants in Delaware, California, and Maryland—mostly in Ocean City. His personal preference is for seafood, and he has raves for a local seafood purveyor who provides him with “whatever he wants,” including sea bass (he steers clear of the over-fished Chilean variety), scallops, red snapper, grouper, rock, crab, and mussels.

Curcio does a great job with an appetizer of cozze al vino bianco, steaming plump mussels in a traditional garlicky white wine broth, but adding olives, capers, chilies, and his own tomato sauce to the brew. It stands as a signature dish, and goes perfectly with the restaurant’s excellent rolls, crusty and hot from the oven. His artistic touch was evident in another appetizer of carpaccio di Manzo, translucent slices of rosy, rare beef garnished with roasted tomato, pickled red onions, mustard, and shavings of Parmesan cheese. A third appetizer, featured as a special that evening, was a hodgepodge of pulled pork, pieces of pancetta, and a flourish of white beans. What it lacked in eye appeal was redeemed by a palate-piquing mix of homey flavors—something straight from an Italian mama’s kitchen.

The year’s most popular salad seems to be a mix of greens, pears, walnuts, and a soft cheese in a fruity dressing. Portofino’s version is good, using perky arugula and radicchio lettuce as a bed for chopped pears sparked with Gorgonzola in a citrusy vinaigrette. It was big enough to share, as we awaited our first courses and observed Di Pasquale in constant motion. He personally presented our entrees, taking over from an earnest but inexperienced server.

Perciatelli alla Bolognese stood out as the sole traditional Italian dish on the menu, and it was a good choice if you like a hearty sauce with your pasta. The recipe calls for finely ground beef, carrots, garlic, and celery simmered a long time with plum tomatoes, milk, and red wine to produce a thick ragu that is best with short tube-shaped pastas such as the perciatelli used by Portofino’s chef. His rendition is robustly delicious, made more so by a last-minute incorporation of cheeses that adds to the rich flavors of the dish.

Another pasta dish, frutti di mare, did not evoke the same praise. Although the seafood (shrimp, calamari, and mussels) was impeccably fresh, its bed of linguine was limp and a light tomato sauce used too sparingly to give character to the presentation. Sagaro in Padella, a designation nowhere to be found in my collection of cookbooks, turned out to be a snowy slab of red snapper sautéed with lemon, raisins, pine nuts, garlic, and herbs, and finished with a white wine sauce. Oddly paired with boiled potatoes, it was nonetheless a wonderfully tasty creation.

Desserts include tartufo, tiramisu, cannoli, or tangerine sorbet. We loved the tartufo, an indulgent treat featuring vanilla ice cream encased in chocolate, dusted with cocoa, and coated with chopped hazelnuts. Cappuccino and an espresso concluded a meal marked by culinary highs and lows and marred by what can only be described as well-intentioned but inept service. The first few months of a restaurant’s life are the equivalent of trial by fire, but if it gets a bit bolder in its ethnicity and acquires a little more finesse, Portofino could find a niche in the expanding realm of Talbot County’s culinary excellence.

Mary Lou Baker has been a food and travel writer for twenty years.