Monthly Archives: January 2019

La Villa

I have been to the South of France as often as I’ve been to Paris (3x). It is that beautiful. With a beautiful city, almost always, comes fantastic food. La Villa features French Riviera cuisine. Two weeks ago, they featured their brand-spanking new chef, Kevin d’Andrea. He brought with him authentic creations that brings me back to many good memories that I spent in Nice, Cannes, Eze and St. Tropez.

Here’s a throwback pic from 20 pounds ago. Behind me is the City of Nice and the French Riviera

Wine list is fantastic. We got ourselves a Chateauneuf-du-Pape.
Good selections on their cheese plate
Lobster Linguine, homemade pasta, roasted whole lobster
Burgundy Black Truffle Risotto, Arborio rice cooked with fresh vegetable stock and melted Parmesan cheese
Truffle Mashed Potatoes
Poached Pear – it had some sort of caramel filling and sits on top of a very light and crispy cookie
Banoffee Pie

Overall, the food was overwhelmingly good. The service was excellent. Pricing surprisingly not French-like. I remember eating at this exact location but it was a different French restaurant then. The service was atrocious (although the food was good). I’m glad that a better restaurant took its place.

The manager mentioned that they will be expanding their wine list pretty soon, all within $88! She believes that a good wine-pairing is important for a good dining experience and did not like price to be a deterrent. I love that kind of progressive thinking. We’ll be back soon!!!

Roma (fka Sud Italia Ristorante)

H-town (Houston), Uncategorized

Roma opened last Friday. I may have mentioned this already, but I do give restaurants a bit of time before trying it out just for them to get the kinks out. I was particularly excited to try their fettuccine nero di seppia allo scoglio. 

I’ve been seeing this dish more often. It is worth noting that there are actually two types of squid ink pasta. The first is with fresh squid cooked in a sauce with its own ink. This produces a very tangy sea flavor and a very interesting black color to the sauce. I had one of the best versions in Corniglia, Italy.

Note that the pasta is actually the normal yellowish-white color and the squid sauce makes the dish look black. There is fresh squid and tomatoes as well.

The other version is the actual pasta dough being infused with squid ink giving it a black color plus the sea flavor as well. This is what I had today at Roma.

Black-colored pasta with marinara sauce and clams and shrimps.

Both are excellent and delicious. Both will leave black stains in your teeth which is either gross or endearing, depending on your date. So you might want to skip this if you are out on a date and you are counting heavily on your smile to enamor you partner.

So….back to the new restaurant. It had an excellent selection of Italian wine, reasonably priced.

We had this wonderful Barolo, which pairs really well with….everything!
Pre-squid ink smile
Fresh burratta mozzarella with prosciutto and blood orange.
Lo and behold, Dave did not order steak. He, instead, had grilled octopus with crispy polenta
We had limoncella tarts for dessert–yum!