Buon Appetito

Tonight four of my friends and I went to dinner at Buon Appetito in Canton. This is a small Italian Restaurant that apparently even Google Maps doesn’t know about, or at least how to get there. A tip if you decide to go to Buon Appetito use Google Maps to get close but as soon as you are almost there on Albany Avenue in Canton turn off the phone before it sends you down a dead end road that you can only look at the back of the building but can’t get to. Braving Google Maps inaccuracies to find Buon Appetito is worth it. This is a very good little Italian restaurant that does a lot right. There are a few things they get wrong as well, but overall the many good things vastly outweigh the few mistakes. First off they don’t serve alcohol so its BYOB, this can be a good thing for a couple that drinks, but not so good with a larger group that ,most doesn’t drink. There was two of us that drank, which mean 3 didn’t. Yet they charge a cork fee of $1.50 per person, so for one bottle of wine with two drinkers they charged $7.50 for the pleasure of using their glasses and their corkscrew. Now if I was in the habit of drinking $50 bottle of wines that the restaurant would charge me $100 for, then I might not mind a $7.50 cork fee. even if 3 people gave me dirty looks for having to pay for my drinking habit. But when I normally buy a $10 – $15 bottle of wine $7.50 for glasses seems a bit much. I have a portable cork screw and hell I have been known to drink out of the bottle on occasion. But enough nit picking back to the very good food. Ok I lied one more nit to pick. This is an Italian Restaurant, for Gods sake serve bread and not just appetizer priced garlic bread. Italian food needs bread to soak up all the good sauces and they do have good sauces. Which brings us back to the good food. I had an appetizer special of hot sausage with sweet peppers and onions. The sausage was nicely hot, leaving your tongue tingling, and the heat of the sausage was balanced by the sweetness of the peppers and onions, making for a wonderful dance in my mouth. My main course was Seafood Mediterranean, which the menu describes as “fresh mussels, clams, calamari, scallops, shrimp & fresh fish in a spicy garlicky tomato broth with fresh herbs. The classic San Francisco Fisherman’s Stew. Served over Linguine.” The seafood was tastey, as was the pasta. I was not as big a fan of the broth, preferring a fra diavolo sauce myself. But I feel that is more a personal preference and not a fair critique of the dish, which I feel was prepared well. For dessert I had a chocolate cake, with a layer of chocolate mouse and topped with a layer of sweet mascarpone cheese. Which brings me to the final nit. The dessert menu was mislabeled on some items. A chocolate cake dish (sorry the online menu doesn’t give the desserts and my memory can’t remember the names) was actually a mousse, and the strawberry sauce topping for the cheesecake was actually raspberry, much to the disappointment of my friends when they attempted to order the former and ordered the latter only to be “surprised” with the different sauce. Overall, the minor misses are just that, minor. This is a very good restaurant with very good food and even better if you enjoy picking a nit or two. This review is long so I am not going to describe my friends food, which I didn’t try, but I will try to in the photos.