| rev:text
| - My previous review was based on a visit several months ago. At that time everything was mostly OK, but not outstanding.
We went again tonight and some dramatic improvements in the food justify an update.
We had the caprese salad, medium size antipasto, and the pear + prosciutto + goat cheese + pizza, and the steak in pepper and cheese sauce with fingerling potatoes from the special menu. As a dessert we had the tiramisu. Or rather, *I* did because after one bite I tried to keep the sharing to a minimum.
The caprese salad - mozzarella, tomatoes, basil - was good. So was the antipasto with several different varieties of olives, cheeses, salami, tuna (that one didn't fit in) and greens. All quite good but also so simple and basic that it's hard to mess it up. The medium antipasto is very large, easily a full meal by itself.
The pizza was outstanding, however. Much more real Italian-style than their semolina pizzas, with a wonderful, buttery thin wheat crust, excellent homemade red sauce with the perfect level of oregano, and thinly sliced pear, chunks of goat cheese, wonderful prosciutto, and uncooked spinach leaves. The taste and mouthfeel was divine and the experience was a very pleasant surprise. Most pizza places in Phoenix make an Americanized and standardized version of pizza, and that's fine. But what I got to devour at Amano tonight was more like what you might get at a pizzeria in Italy.
There are also some finer pizza places in Scottsdale that make pizza like this. But for the part of the Valley Amano is located at (South Mountain / Baseline corridor), this is as good as it gets - by far.
The steak was enormous, and the house sauce very flavorful. They call it pepper and cheese sauce but it tasted like butter blended with an angel's song. Ok that's a bit much but it was indeed excellent.
It knocked my wife's usual favorite steak from The Cheesecake Factory (steak diane) to second place.
And finally, the tiramisu. OMG! I'm a dessert fiend and tiramisu is one of the goodies I tend to find fault with when I order it at some other Italian restaurants in the Valley. And honestly, it's pretty easy to mess up tiramisu. Many other places make it too soggy, too sweet, or have a totally flavorless and goopy mascarpone. Amano got it right! Perfect mouthfeel, perfect flavor. I'm not sure if they actually used finger biscuits and that technicality would be the only neg here if that is the case. Besides that I simply can't say enough good things about their tiramisu. In fact, I might go back tomorrow evening for another one.
The place was packed given it was a Friday night. Of course, with maybe 12 tables in the whole restaurant, it's easy to get "packed". Because the place is so small, the noise level was pretty high. If you like to go on a Friday night, making a reservation is highly recommended.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)