THIS RESTAURANT IS CLOSED Baccano Ristorante

THIS RESTAURANT IS CLOSED Baccano Ristorante Restaurant Review:

It had to happen. Belltown has its first tourist trap. At this restaurant/theme park, which opened in November, 1999, you can dine inside a virtual Italian villa or outdoors in a virtual Italian piazza, complete with fountain. The faux street scene includes storefronts, marble balconies and grand staircases. A pagnottaro (bread vendor) in bakery whites pushes a wooden cart around the square loaded with fresh bread (baked, for the time being, elsewhere). The marketing concept here includes fancy foodstuffs bearing the Baccano label, a high-tech reservations system that will track your favorite wine and food and even a travel consultant. The wood-burning pizza oven is on view, too, and pizza was the best thing we tasted. Most dishes are prepared for two or more and meant to be served family style. Our waiter promises that he won’t allow us to order too much. We start with a thin-crusted, judiciously topped, blistered pizza. We might have dueled over the two large meatballs had they not been so dry, or fought for the last of five cappellacci stuffed with a paste of chicken and sausage had they not been so hard. The veal saltimbocca, tough and backed by even tougher prosciutto, also languishes on the plate in a congealed gravy next to a disintegrating mound of over-whipped potatoes. We perk up at the sight of cracked Dungeness crab in the cioppino, but almost everything else in the bowl is overcooked. The tiramisu was fine, a gift from our waiter to make up for the long delay between pasta and piatti principali. Needless to say, we did not throw a coin in the fountain before leaving-although maybe a wish for better food if we return in the future would have been in order. Strolling back through the faux ruins to the front door, we note several couples cozily ensconced in the vinoteca (wine bar) and decide that, should we return, we’ll forego the piazza and duck into the vinoteca for a pizza and a glass of wine from the Cal-Ital-Northwest list.