This week in Dish we look at D'Angelo, the casual Italian pizzeria and trattoria from Fort Lauderdale's Angelo Elia. Earlier this month, we named D'Angelo our Best New Restaurant in Broward. Now, in our print review, we elaborate on how good the simple, Italian small plates and pizzas are.
In Mario Batali's newest cookbook, Molto Gusto -- a gorgeous full-color picture book that omits big protein-based main courses and features dreamy antipastos instead -- there's a chapter devoted exclusively to cured Italian meats. Seeing the five different types of prosciutto pictured there is so high on my food porn scale that the pages of my copy are practically matted together like an old Playboy.Check out the full review of D'Angelo, including a nifty slideshow from New Times photog C. Stiles, in this week's Dish.
I get the same longing feeling looking at that book as I do walking past the bright display cases at D'Angelo, Chef Angelo Elia's newest restaurant in Oakland Park. When a hostess leads me towards a table in the back of the restaurant, my vision stays focused on those deli-style coolers until I'm pivoting 180 degrees like some awkward bobblehead. Inside is the motherload: Picturesque hunks of prosciutto all marbled and pink. Purple-red rounds of air-cured bresaola. Milanese and Calabresian salamis each tinted the color of red wine and speckled with fat. On top of one case is a nightly special - a wrapped, stuffed pork loin cooked in D'Angelo's wood-burning oven. Later, my waitress explains to me that the chefs cut the loin into inch thick slices and serve it like an appetizer with fresh focaccia bread baked in those same ovens. As she describes it, I drift off somewhere else. "Hey there, pork loin," I coo to the quivering slice of homemade charcuterie. "You had me at hello."