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| - Tonight my wife and I had a wonderful evening at Il Bosco, open since February, smack in the middle of Davidson, NC, a tiny hamlet adjacent to one of the premier liberal arts colleges in the US. The fact that Davidson is small has likely been the cause of its lack of high-end fine dining restaurants over the years, but as Lake Norman and Charlotte have grown into the Davidson community's economy, it is time for a restaurant such as Il Bosco.
The fresh bread offered at the beginning was warm, with a soft interior and crisp, slightly salty crust, and perfect for the white beans served alongside in a fine, light olive oil. Classic Tuscan.
We ordered two apps (antipasti) - grilled vegetables on some delicious mozzarella and arugula on one plate, and a well-chosen set of salumi on another, with great olives, all at their most tender and flavorful and at room temperature, showing the kitchen's sensitivity to their plates. Our wine was a very good Barbera d'Alba, which was made with a bit of Western wine style, but ultimately a good choice for our primi piatti. Before the primi piatti arrived, though, we had small pasta plates: Angela ordered the gnocchi with a great slow-cooked beef in a ragu sauce, and I ordered a piccolo size of penne with pesto, topped with perfectly toasted pine nuts.
To the primi piatti: Angela ordered the osso buco and I ordered the bone-in pork chop with an agrodolce topping with an accompanying white wine sauce. Angela's osso buco was slightly underseasoned, and the polenta cakes a bit oversalty. If you ate them together in one bite (which is not the way they were presented), they were quite excellent. The osso buco was falling off the bone - another sign that the kitchen was truly smart about Italian food. My pork chop was the hit, however, with the right acidity and sweetness in the agrodolce and a nice, slow-cooked chop with plenty of moisture still in the meat, a sign of a restrained hand that knows how to gauge temperature when doing such chops.
The dessert was a dense flourless chocolate cake, made by Joe, who also had done Angela's pillow-soft gnocchi. It was perfect, with the right choice of high-quality chocolate, a lovely creamy mouth-feel, and a perfect Remy Martin on the side to ease it onto the palate.
Service was congenial and efficient, with team service (Joe was food runner). Our waitress was also the bartender - for a bar that looks very inviting, situated next to a lounge that looked very comfortable for enjoying a drink and conversation before or after dinner.
All in all, this is a place that competes well with restaurants in any major city on the Eastern seaboard.
Truly worth the visit.
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