Restaurants

Classic Collection

The dècor is nothing to write home about, but Luciano's sure-handed take on Italian favorites ensures that you won't care

By Melissa Martin 

"When your most prominent architectural feature is the exit sign, you know you have a problem," my dining companion observed dryly as we surveyed Luciano's drab interior. The restaurant is housed in Clayton Plaza, a new high-rise condominium tower that stands shoulder to shoulder with the Ritz-Carlton. Its plain-vanilla dining room resembles nothing so much as an expensive Florida timeshare, right down to the beige sculptured carpet and rattan café chairs.

Stakeholders in the Del Pietro's Culinart group faced the same demographic conundrum tackled by the newly opened restaurant Smith & Slay's: It must attract the wealthy, mainly older residents of the condominium without seeming stodgy to the slipstream of blithe young diners that flows through Clayton every weekend. Slay's cleverly uses a retro supper-club theme to appeal to both groups. Luciano's, in a Clintonesque effort to please everyone, is done up in soporific neutrals. The blandness of the setting calls to mind those prisons in which the walls are painted an institutional green to soothe agitated inmates. This middle-of-the-road strategy certainly avoids alienating the AARP lobby, but it leaves the bar as empty as an Enron boardroom.

Aside from those eye-catching exit signs, Luciano's dining room is illumined by incongruous chandeliers whose tiny Technicolor bulbs look like the Christmas lights strung up year-round above bars in Festus and South City. A word of caution, ladies: This is not ideal date lighting. One side of the table may be bright enough to stitch up an episiotomy, whereas splotchy shadows on the other side throw every wrinkle and blemish into relief. Low-hanging spots would even out the lighting, but it seems as though the restaurant wants to be able to quickly add or remove tables depending on bookings.

We predict they'll be scooting four-tops into every corner once the word gets out about the food here. St. Louis has a glut of Italian restaurants, yet chef Mark Del Pietro and manager Jamie Del Pietro have hit upon a unique style. They split the difference between wicker-bread-basket informality and lugubrious stuffiness. And they wisely do not try to usurp the "rustic Italian food" label that's already represented so well by places such as Trattoria Marcella, I Fratellini and Lorenzo's Trattoria.

The menu is staid, with few surprises, and we've yet to see a real Italian belly up to a sixteen-ounce strip steak. (Nor, for that matter, would any self-respecting Sicilian knock back a sissy California Merlot from Luciano's all-things-to-all-people wine list.) So why do we like the food? It's simple. Even the most timeworn recipes taste better than other versions we've had. A touchstone at most upscale Italian restaurants, for instance, is a salad of field greens or basil leaves, sliced tomatoes, mozzarella di bufala and roasted red peppers. But the dish is often a bust because the tomatoes are unripe or because the unsalted fresh mozzarella lacks punch. Mr. Del Pietro uses pristine tomatoes, and he splashes a white-balsamic vinaigrette over the salad to tease more flavor from the vegetables and unify the elements of the dish.

The best way to dine at Luciano's is to share several antipasti, sides, salads, soups and half-portions of pasta (available on request). This spread might include a side of eggplant Parmigiano. The slices of melanzane, layered with Parmigiano-Reggiano and Fontina cheeses and tomato sauce, have no trace of the bitterness and mushiness that have given the dish a bad name. Oven-roasted mussels in saffron cream are another fine choice. The pale-lemon broth is more reminiscent of a briny tide pool than of a gluttonous cream sauce. The menu includes five pizzas made with wood-fired crusts that are good enough to stand on their own, perhaps brushed with a little olive oil and sprinkled with coarse salt. Our pizza, a special one evening, was freighted with Gorgonzola and Parmigiano cheeses, whole arugula leaves, caramelized pear wedges and broad ribbons of prosciutto di Parma curled up like wood shavings.

The measure of an Italian restaurant is taken by its pastas, of course, and Luciano's scores high with its tortelloni. These pie-shaped pillows of pasta, puffed with cheese, are each about the diameter of a quarter. They're blanketed with a tight pesto cream brightened with scraps of sun-dried tomatoes. As gratuitous as all this goopiness sounds (and we'll spare you the trite joke about the cardiologist), the dish doesn't have the palate-coating heaviness of most cream sauces. Encouraged by this foray onto the pasta list, we decided to try linguini with clam sauce, a dish that always sounds promising in theory but fizzles in practice. This rendition, too -- stiff store-bought linguini slicked with a thin garlicky sheen -- was a dud. It was nevertheless the best we've had, owing to the addition of littleneck clams in-shell. But we haven't found a St. Louis restaurant yet that rolls out its own linguini. If we can do it at home, surely a kitchen full of culinary-school grads could manage. Mr. Del Pietro tells us that he and his prep cooks plan to begin making their pasta in-house soon, and we hope they give the linguini a whirl.

• 1
• 2
Next Page »