Italian With a Distinctive Accent
Spezie makes itself over with a little help from a friend

By Tom Sietsema
The Washington Post Magazine
Sunday, Jan. 13, 2008

Carpaccio, fried calamari, veal ravioli -- the selection at a lot of Italian restaurants is so similar that you hardly need to crack a menu to know what's for dinner. The trick, then, is to find those chefs who aim to make the commonplace special.

Cesare Lanfranconi sets a delicious example. Recruited by his friend Enzo Livia, the owner of Spezie, to breathe new life into the 6 1/2-year-old restaurant, Lanfranconi spent much of last summer rewriting the menu. Food followers may be scratching their heads, wondering why he would want to help out a competitor; Lanfranconi, 39, was the opening chef at the elegant Ristorante Tosca on F Street NW, after all, and, while he no longer cooks there, he maintains a partnership in the business. But both men felt the restaurants had distinct identities and audiences, and, with Roberto Donna's Galileo on hiatus, Lanfranconi thought downtown could benefit from "a good, solid Italian place."

I've eaten my way through a SeaWorld's worth of (fried) seafood in my career. Yet here I am at Spezie, greedily competing with a companion for yet another sweet scallop, juicy oyster or tender squid tentacle that make the fritto misto such an exciting mix. Bound in a simple batter, fried to an appealing shade of gold and brought to the table with basil puree, the morsels taste as if they have been individually hand-dipped in hot oil. And they only benefit from the herbed dip.

There's a little magic in the carpaccio, too, which appears as a plate of tissue-thin, deep-red slices of rare lamb. The meat is good enough to eat on its own; shaved fennel and a light parsley puree, spread over the lamb, nudge the appetizer from good to grand. Yet another reason to drop by are velvety roasted red and yellow peppers, bright with basil (oil) and dressed up with triangles of breaded smoked mozzarella, which, when pierced, release a molten flow of sublime cheese. Lanfranconi is a restrained chef, rarely adding more than is necessary to build a dish. What he does incorporate tends to enhance it.

Can't decide between two swell-sounding pastas? No problem. The kitchen is happy to serve you half-portions of each. And so it was that I got to compare the house-made fettuccine topped with crumbled pork sausage and a creamy leek sauce side by side with the buckwheat tagliatelle tossed with diced potato, Swiss chard and runny fontina. As different as the pastas were, I wouldn't have wanted to have to choose one over the other. Both set off mental applause meters. Even something as familiar as veal-stuffed ravioli tastes special when this kitchen makes it. The sheer, stamp-size packets and finely ground meat, whose seasoning hints of roasted vegetables and bold herbs, pass for edible love letters. The only starch that raised any flags during my visits was the risotto. It was fluffy and oily the time I tried it, with the consistency of Chinese fried rice, and clinging to the side of the mound were slender, faintly crunchy rolls of imported Treviso radicchio that looked like candy canes. A friend suggested the risotto be rebranded. "It would make a great pilaf," he whispered.

There are dishes at the rethought Spezie that you probably haven't encountered in another local Italian dining room. One standout is a rustic "stew" of oysters, the plump and barely cooked bivalves loosely arranged with braised leeks, porcini and aromatics in a warm bath of wine and fish broth. Another, part of an extravagant tasting menu, was a frittata of pumpkin and braised snails.

Meat dishes -- grilled lamb chops with roasted potatoes; pork in a wash of raisin-sweetened sauce -- are perfectly pleasant. But why settle for pleasant when there's such good fish on the menu? Barely cooked tuna pooled with mustard sauce and ringed with spicy rapini is a fine display of dueling flavors and textures, and soft chunks of octopus on a swipe of polenta whisk a diner far away from Washington. The simpler preparations are impressive, too. Lightly oiled whole grilled fish (go for the meaty branzino) comes with a tableside carving show, terrific spinach and mashed potatoes tinted pink with tomato.

The one dessert you should make time for is a strudel of pumpkin and quince; the one you should avoid traps figs in a dull, doughy fried batter.

While the menu was being remade, so was the interior, which is now darker in the dining room but retains the original sconces crafted with herbs artfully encased in resin. (Spezie is Italian for "spices.") The biggest change is in the bar, whose seating was expanded to include a tall communal table imprinted with a leafy design. The golden-hued bar, which bridges Spezie's lunch and dinner hours with a light fare menu, is preferable to the somewhat staid dining room.

There's a slight Keystone Kops quality to the service. A request to have a bottle of wine chilled is acknowledged, then promptly forgotten. Guests and I are impressed by a waiter who takes a dinner order for the table without writing down a word -- until he has to return to fill in his memory blanks. And when one of the hosts spots me pouring my own wine, he rushes over, just as I'm finishing, to complete the task. Wresting the bottle from my hands, all he can do is set it down.

The new Spezie isn't the prettiest dining room downtown, and the service, while gracious, could use some polishing. But the addition of Lanfranconi has given the restaurant a nice boost. More often than not, Spezie is, as the chef hoped it would be, "a good, solid Italian place."