RESTAURANT REVIEW : The Flavors of Italy Assert Themselves at Market City Caffe

What’s in a name? I’ll tell you what. If a restaurant’s name includes the word lobster, nothing will get me to eat there. But if it has the word city in the name, I’ll always go. Any old city will do: Rose City, Angel City, Crown City. I’d probably even go if a place just called itself City Restaurant.

Or even if it called itself Market City Caffe, as an exposed-bricks-and-beams sort of Italian restaurant in Pasadena does. It socks you with two things as you walk in the door: stacks of produce (hence the “market” part of the name) and a huge antipasto bar, mostly filled with pasta salads. The bar also features wonderful grilled eggplant, sliced very thin and evidently fried with garlic after grilling.

This is a place that is not afraid of assertive flavors. Garlic isn’t squeezed here; it’s diced chunky-style. There’s a snappy appetizer of prosciutto and mushrooms where everything is soaked in balsamic vinegar (you get a lemon to squeeze on it too). The pizza portofino is ripely topped with mozzarella mixed with goat cheese and walnuts. Scamorza alla griglia is an appetizer of melted smoked mozzarella, which is pretty flavorful if you can scrape it off the plate.

The meat entrees (served with either pasta marinara, sauteed julienne vegetables or roasted potato) are brushed with olive oil and rather simply grilled. The swordfish is perfectly cooked (though the olive oil flavor may take some getting used to), and the veal chop is treated with respect. The lamb chop, though, may be nicely browned on the outside but at the cost of being rather dry.

The grilled trout is a pleasant surprise: It’s boned, and some fresh sage leaves are inserted, which together with the basting of olive oil gives an interesting flavor to this notoriously bland fish. On the other hand, the bistecca florentina is a puzzle. The steak is neither tender nor flavorful and has no sauce, and it’s a real challenge to detect the purported balsamic vinegar marinade.

The pastas don’t seem to be as good as the rest of the menu. The best I’ve had was some gimmicky ravioli (one side of each was green pasta, the other side was red) filled with spinach and ricotta, fried in butter with a little sage after boiling. However, the bow ties in a cream sauce colored with tomato paste and peas is kiddie food, even if you can taste the prosciutto. And the penne, though served with nice Italian sausage, have a tomato sauce with a sinister sharp edge.

Dessert is an unexpected specialty here. The tirami su is one of the best versions I’ve ever had, very rich and creamy and with nothing of the soaked cake crumb quality of an English trifle. The cheesecake is extremely distinctive. In a rather thick sweet crust, tan all the way through (this monster must have spent a long time in the oven), it has a layer of raisins and a layer of orange-flavored frosting bookending a very dense, almost hard cheese filling. It’s delicious. There’s also a model with almonds.

On the whole, everything’s pretty good. I feel fairly vindicated in my practice of going to restaurants with the word city in the name. I live in terror, though, that somebody is going to name a restaurant Lobster City.