Donato Enoteca

I love happy accident discoveries! We were on our way to another restaurant... when we found out it was closed on Sundays (why do restaurants do that? They're just killing their business). We were determined to eat ASAP, so we Yelped furiously and found a place nearby.

Our first appetizer was grilled calamari--remember, if you want fried calamari, it's "calamari fritti" in Italian. I really liked this--it's so tender--but they cooked it so that the calamari's juices stay inside. This makes it taste like the ocean, which I love, but it can be really fishy.

Our second appetizer was braised wild boar bruschetta, which was basically a really gamey pulled pork. The boar was really cooked really simply--with a lot of tomato--and it was very tender, but I wish the bread was thicker and a little bit charred, so it would be a little tougher. The bread was slightly toasted but way too soft, and got really soggy from the boar.

I got the bigoli pasta with oxtail. I love the texture of this pasta--it's like tagliatelle, but thicker and coarser. This super dense texture is so unusual, but I wish more restaurants would use it! The oxtail was really tender, but it was all in shreds, so you get smatterings of its flavor throughout the pasta. Although it might not be as satisfying without big chunks of meat, it makes the dish a lot lighter, but you still get just as much flavor.

My boyfriend got the buckwheat pasta with mushrooms. The pasta is in large ribbons, which really accentuates the grittiness of the buckwheat--it's hard to grind buckwheat very finely, but the grit wouldn't be very apparent in thinner noodles, like soba. The mushroom flavor was good, but I didn't find that it was really different from that of other mushroom pastas.

Apparently this is how my boyfriend takes food photographs.
It's "artistic."

I was really torn between two desserts... the tiramisu and chocolate fondant. I think I made the right choice! All tiramisus are really flavorful, but a big problem I have with a lot of them is that the cake gets really soggy from sitting in the espresso all day and then it all becomes all one moist, too-soft texture. This one, though, wasn't soaked through with espresso, and each layer was nice and separated.

Donato Enoteca
1041 Middlefield Rd
http://www.donatoenoteca.com/