Lucca Café
This intimate Irvine restaurant brings a bit of Italy to Orange County.
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| Take it To Go Too busy to cook? Join the club – literally. Lucca Café’s Lucca2Go program prepares full meals of all of your favorites in individual portions or for a family. Pick up freshly prepared food anytime between 4-8 p.m. 949.725.1773 :: luccacafe.com |
Bumper crops from local farmers and charcuterie that hails just as often from the Italian countryside as a curing house in California make up the antipasto platter that begins a meal at Lucca Café, a small, intimate restaurant tucked away in the hills of Irvine. It might as well be a villa on a hillside in Tuscany somewhere; if you forget about the 405 a stone’s throw from Quail Hill, and block out the neon lights from the supermarket in the same shopping center, the sparsely decorated restaurant with an open kitchen, deli counter, walls full of wine, and white tablecloths feels a lot like a dining experience in the world’s food mecca – and tastes a lot like one, too.
After making our way through the abundant antipasto platter – replete with sweet-and-sour cipollini, goat cheese soufflé-filled tomatoes, broccoli raab, olives, and a selection of charcuterie, including various selections from American producers like Seattle-based Salumi (run by Armandino Batali, father of the famed chef Mario Batali) and Berkeley, California’s Fra’ Mani – the thought of a meal that was really yet to commence was both exciting and intimidating.
With a menu ranging from homemade soups to handmade pastas and all manner of meats and seafood in a variety of preparations, the problem at Lucca, really, had become more a question of editing than anything else. How to choose between the herb-crusted rack of New Zealand lamb and the porcini-dusted Angus hangar steak? The honey-grilled Loch Duart salmon (with pear-thyme-horseradish chutney!) or the trio of peri-peri-glazed jumbo shrimp? Our dilemma, while enviable, was sincere, so it was with great enthusiasm that we took the news that dining at Lucca is not a one-man-one-dish affair, but rather a family-style event in which many small plates take the place of a couple large ones, and sharing is encouraged.
Bolstered with this knowledge, we began with two pasta dishes: The first, a trio of handmade pasta “handkerchiefs,” were stuffed respectively with Humboldt Fog and four cheeses and topped with pesto cream sauce; butternut squash with brown butter sage sauce; and short ribs with ricotta and tomato ragú. Arranged on a long plate to replicate the colors of the Italian flag, the pasta, thin and delicate, did justice to its origins.
Our favorite of the three – the butternut squash – was subtle and just a touch sweet, but balanced perfectly with the wild sage and salty butter, a traditional flavor combination common in northern Italy. The four-cheese handkerchief with Humboldt Fog was just the slightest bit pungent (in a good way), nicely offset by the herbaceous basil in the pesto, while the short rib-ricotta mixture added a different (and somewhat odd) slice of Americana that, while tasty, threw us momentarily off the Mediterranean vibe.
We became convinced once again, however, when our second pasta dish arrived still bubbling in its cooking vessel: deconstructed spinach lasagna with Bolognese ragú. Tired of overly ambitious, “creative” versions of a perfectly good classic, it was a pleasure to find Chef Cathy Pavlos’s version of lasagna to be a true take on the original, with a full-flavored ragú and wise absence of unnecessary fluff.
From the seafood menu (which consists of all sustainably raised fish), we tried a sampler, which consisted of a Maryland crab cake with preserved lemon aioli; a Diver scallop in a parmesan basket over spinach; and a trio of peri-peri-glazed jumbo shrimp. The crab cake was, as expected from its golden-brown hue, crispy and full of lumps of sweet crab meat, all complemented by the intensely lemon-y aioli. The scallop, however, was unfortunately on the slimy side, a result of being undercooked, but the peri-peri-glazed jumbo shrimp made an impression with a bite from the African chili pepper that serves as the sauce’s base. The seafood dish that hit all the right points, however, was the pine nut-herb crusted halibut with a cannelini risotto cake, parsley butter, spinach, and Provencal sauce.
Most memorable of all was the porcini-dusted Angus hangar steak with Yukon Gold potatoes, roasted shallots, wild mushrooms, and Cabernet-béarnaise sauce. Tender strips of steak were coated in a rich emulsion tinged with acid from the wine and mellowed with earthy mushrooms – enough to declare this concoction of Pavlos’s the ultimate winner for the night.
Dessert at Lucca consisted of a gingerbread-pomegranate curd crème brulée with white chocolate-pomegranate reduction and tuile leaves that, while resembling more of a custard than crème brulée, still captured our attention after a long and filling evening. An unusual but satisfying combination of gingerbread and pomegranate worked, especially in conjunction with the sweet sauce on the side.
Lucca Café at Quail Hill may not be Italy, but for a couple hours, it might just well do.
