| rev:text
| - My fiancée and I visited Luce on our last evening in Charlotte, a Wednesday night in November. We arrived at about 6PM without a reservation and were seated immediately. The staff had no objection to our sitting for half an hour eating olives and sharing a single cocktail to pass some time before we ordered our main meal.
As many other reviewers have mentioned, the olives are excellent. So was the negroni. The ambiance was authentically Italian (and we have been to Italy before): intimate, quiet, and comfortable. A lot of this is due to the wait staff, who are all at least ethnically Italian, and in some cases rather adorably fresh-off-the-boat.
When we finally got around to ordering dinner off of their fall menu, we settled upon a meal with one main course and contorni to share. My fiancée had (A) the spinach papardelle with oxtail ragù and I had (B) the risotto ai frutti di mare (a daily special). To share, (1) cannellini beans with escarole and (2) spinach fried with garlic. Upon the waitress's recommendation we also ordered one glass of Sangiovese to accompany the entire meal.
My fiancée is allergic to most dairy, and when she asked whether the ragù had any milk in it, the staff's immediate answer was "Not that one," which really is the most reassuring answer that one can possibly get.
The food was, on the whole, marvelous:
(0) The first thing to arrive after we'd ordered was a cold cannellini bean salad with peppers, onions, and basil, served with bread. Every table got this. It made a great opener.
(A) The pasta was house-made. Good, though we have had better - but that was in Italy. The ragù was excellent, with the flavors of tomato, oxtail, wine, and carrot in good balance, and an amazing mouth feel.
(B) My seafood risotto had clams, scallops, calamari, shrimp, and mussels. The key to seafood is freshness, and what went into my dish was certainly very fresh, with no off-flavors whatsoever. For my part, I could also taste that they used very high quality cream. The rice, unfortunately, was a bit grainy. My guess is that they had one pot of it cooking continuously throughout the night, and that since we arrived early in the night, the risotto actually wasn't quite done. Nevertheless, the flavors were so good and well-melded that I hardly minded.
(1) The cannellini with escarole was perhaps the one disappointment of the night. The escarole was blanched first, so it lost its signature bitterness, which we both expected it to contribute to this dish.
(2) The spinach with garlic was 'a good straight line' as the two of us put it. Is there a cuisine in the world which -doesn't- like spinach stir-fried with garlic?
We finished with coffee; our waiter commented upon our ordering coffee instead of desserts, "yeah, that's how we do it in Italy." I had black and she had espresso. The espresso was very well made, and my coffee definitely benefited from (again) the very good cream.
Our whole meal ran us $85 including tax before tip, and included two drinks, two main courses, two side dishes, and two coffees. We weren't billed for the tiny plates of olives we had during cocktails, so we left extra tip to match the staff's generosity.
Luce is the most authentic Italian dining experience we have had in the United States.
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