--may 2018:
i had only ever been to this paesano's location for lunch (see review below, from last year), but had dinner there a couple of nights ago.
the ambience of the place is as pleasant in the evenings as it is during the day. it was a little more than half-full, but the décor absorbs the noise nicely, so it was easily half an hour before i realised there was music playing in the background. the service was impeccable.
i chose shrimp paesano as my main dish; my wife chose porco osso buco -- pig shank instead of veal. mine came with a large serving of spaghetti in butter sauce, hers with gnocci on the side. both came with salad.
the salads were very well done. the components are trimmed well enough to make me think the kitchen here still adheres to the old rule of thumb that nothing in a salad should be larger than a lady's mouth, and the house dressing was light, flavourful and deftly applied. (my wife, who ordered her dressing on the side, received a ramekin of the same bland cream dressing i mention in the previous review below.)
and of course there's the bread. in my memory thebreadat paesano's is exquisite, so much so that i was surprised, on re-reading my previous review, to find this is not always so. indeed, thebreadat dinner exhibited the same lack of quality that i had noted eighteen months before; it was dense, small, and slightly stale. so much for the memory.
my wife's porco osso buco was excellent. the meat was fall-off-the-bone tender, wonderfully seasoned, and served in a mélange of vegetables in sauce that brought out the flavours entirely. the gnocci was in a slightly-heavy cream sauce but nonetheless had a marvelous texture and good potato taste. it was lightly seasoned, mostly with parsley, to avoid overwhelming the root flavour.
if i had a complaint about my shrimp paesano, it was that there was perhaps too much butter. but that hardly counts as a complaint, except for my concern with my weight; it's like complaining that one has too much money or too many friends. the shrimp -- five or six good-sized ones -- were battered and baked to the point of perfection. the textural combination of the meat and the batter is superb.
prices, as noted before, are high but not extreme. our dinner, including tip, ran just over $80.
the curmudgeon’s ratings (explained, sort of, on the curmudgeon-about-town blog):
food: 3 1/2 chili peppers (out of 5)
service: 4 1/2 chili peppers
ambience: 3 1/2 chili peppers
value: 2 chili peppers
--january 2017:
the song says "all things must pass"; i guess so. the wonderful mediterranean salad i used to get here with a perfectly grilled chicken breast sliced atop it is gone, gone.... yesterday at lunch i ordered the spring mix salad, with grilled salmon. it was good, i guess. not as good as the old salad, but okay. it came with a fairly bland cream dressing, and a nice mix of leaves, a few smashed-up olives ... but sadly, no dried cranberries, the ingredient that really upped the interest factor of the mediterranean.
the other disappointment was the bread. paesano's is famous for its bread, but of the four kinds on offer yesterday, three were nearing the end of their useful lives, and one of those may already have been gone. thebreadslices have gotten smaller, too; that may be a good thing, but it doesn't make me happy.
my table-mate ordered one of the lunch specials, a chicken parmegiana with a side of spaghetti in butter and garlic. tried that; it was, as expected, perfection. surprising how hard it is to accomplish that in simple dishes, but the kitchen here knows how it's done.
the service was prompt but the waiter mumbled, to the point where i couldn't tell if he had some unusual kind of accent that made him hard to understand. the dining room was up to the restaurant's usual exacting standards. prices were high for my taste ($40 for two people for lunch, without drinks) but not unexpectedly so.
the curmudgeon's ratings:
food: 2 1/2 chili peppers (out of 5)
service: 2 1/2 chili peppers
ambience: 4 chili peppers
value: 2 1/2 chili peppers