THIS RESTAURANT IS CLOSED Tony Marino's Steaks & Chops

THIS RESTAURANT IS CLOSED Tony Marino's Steaks & Chops Restaurant Review:

So you're a meat-and-potatoes type and your sweetie is a vegetarian? This is the restaurant for you. Tony Marino's is humming. On weekend nights, it's best to have a reservation at this new spot run by the former owner/partner of Mike Shannon's Steaks and Seafood downtown. Tony has combined red meat and its friends with some original pasta variations like an eggplant lasagna with goat cheese; the result pleases almost every kind of eater. Décor is simple---this is no velvet-and-brass, high-testosterone steakhouse. The crowds are a completely mixed bag. A large party of business types is cheek-by-chop with a solo diner in a windbreaker. Families are accommodated without condescension---this is, after all, a real family restaurant, with Tony's wife working the front of the house. Particular kudos should go to the house soup, a wonderful oxtail punctuated with barley. It serves the town's only beef rib chop, and is the first place, as far as we know, to offer the newly chic broiled-on-a-cedar-plank method of cooking, here utilized with a slab of salmon sauced with citrus and Champagne. The wine list, while not long, is thoughtful and somewhat off the beaten path. Service, like that at most Manchester Road restaurants, is completely without attitude, something the metro area could use more of.