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| - My wife and I went to Luciano's this past weekend for a belated birthday dinner. I'd never been, but she had on a work outing a while back.
I started with a Goose Island IPA and she got the red sangria. Bread and a small dish of a tomato spread were promptly delivered to our table. The bread was warm and crusty and the tomato was bright and flavorful.
We got white wine mussels as our appetizer. The mussels were tasty but as everyone knows, you don't get the mussels for the mussels. We got some extra bread to dip into the white wine sauce they came in. It was absolutely delicious. At first I thought it was a bit too heavy on the lemon but after my third piece of bread soaked in the stuff, I realized it was necessary to cut the richness of it and it would have tasted a bit too heavy without it.
Both of us got a caesar salad before our mains. The homemade garlic croutons were excellent. The dressing coated every piece of lettuce evenly and the shavings of parm on top were perfect. I also really enjoyed the very coarse grind of the fresh black pepper offered by our server, Omar.
For my entree I got the braised beef agnolotti. It is one of the best things I've eaten at a restaurant in years. It came with brown butter, fried sage, and parmiagiano shavings. The meat inside each one was soft, supple, and delicious. With this entree you only get five or six agnolotti, so there won't be any leftovers, but it's so rich that you don't need any more than that.
My wife got the chicken fra diavolo. I was quite impressed at how tender the chicken was, as breast meat can be woefully overcooked in dishes like that. The herbal complexity of the sauce was also impressive, and the pasta was perfectly al dente.
After all of this we were stuffed but hey, it's my birthday, right? We got our desserts to go. I saw a table of bluehairs order the cannoli and it looked so good I had to have it. My wife got the tiramisu. Even coming out of the fridge a couple hours later, both of them were excellent.
Service was pretty good, and ambiance was fine. The food was the absolute star of the show here, and we will certainly be back.
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