Nicolinni's Updated
 Akron, Ohio        Date of Visit  05/12/11              No Known Website

Something finally opened in the old Bennigan’s building on the hill in Fairlawn. To my surprise a Y-town Italian family restaurant has opened a satellite close to where we live. Oh Dear, measure my excitement. The manager refers to the menu as Briar Hill food which I am very familiar with and often have a longing for so we took our first opportunity to give it a try. It doesn’t look like a Bennigan’s inside anymore, it appears they have made significant changes to the interior. When we arrived the host asked if it would be alright to be seated in a booth in the bar, we said sure, big mistake, but that’s coming.
 

Focaccia
 

The menu contains a lot of classics and a couple of things I hadn’t seen so we mixed things up a little…mostly classics. The server brought a basket of Focaccia which Steph didn’t particularly care for but I found just fine. The whipped butter had a nice salt to it but there was very little going on with the little pot of oil. It needed to be more olive-y or had some garlic etc. added. I ordered the greens and beans with sautéed Italian greens, cannellini beans, and spices simmered in an aglio e olio sauce. It was lighter and more brothy than I am used to but tasted just fine. Steph even liked it and she still thinks she hates beans. The service was okay, you can tell it’s a new place and not all of the kinks had been worked out. That includes the food arriving about three minutes after the salad and our seating. The reason, I’m assuming, we were seated in the bar is the booths there are smaller and would easily accommodate two people but four might be pushing it, so put the two tops in the bar.

Only problem was there were a gaggle of teachers in the bar celebrating something. Teachers tend to be loquacious to begin with, pour a few lemon drops down their gullets and they quickly reach boisterous. Given the proximity of the booths to the bar, we were inducted into the party without permission or desire. Given that we were sitting and they were standing, we spent the lunch trying to talk over them while spending the entire meal with teacher butts hovering an inch away from the table. If the place was busy…okay. But the dining room which we could see through the partition had at best a couple of tables. Not well thought out.

We got a salad which had a very mild vinaigrette that had a slight sweetness which Steph found fabulous. The greens themselves were of a wide variety and offered a variety of texture and bitterness. Steph ordered cavatelli and meatballs. The pasta had good flavor but was so overdone I was surprised it held it’s shape. Disappointing. The sauce was about as chunky as you are going to find. Nearly intact tomatoes pervade the sauce which both of us agreed had a nice flavor. She found the huge chunks helpful for picking them out, which I then ate. The sauce worked well, they just need to pay closer attention to the noodle. The meatballs are great. Soft but not spongy from a lot of filler. Very meaty. They are small and sparse however, Steph’s whole plate was pretty sparse, particularly give the price.
 

I tried something they called Skapetta. Penne pasta with a thin white wine but spicy sauce and lots of peppers and onions. The dish is served with both chicken and the house made sausage. The chicken was fine but the sausage was aggressively delicious with loads of spice that matched well with the spiciness of the sauce. Here the pasta was done very well…who knows. We considered dessert but something about the social studies teacher’s rump rubbing against the end of our table made another minute unappealing, even for crème brule. We will be back. We will try some of our more traditional favorites and let you know. We just won’t be sitting in the bar.
 

So as promised we returned to Niccolini's to try some different classics for comparison. On Father's Day we found a much calmer crowd and since there were four of us we weren't asked to sit in the bar. Much nicer experience. We ordered an appetizer and four entrees and I found most of them to be really very good. We started with fried zucchini. It arrived with the very chunky sauce that sat atop the cavatelli from out previous visit. The planks were thick, well seasoned, and well fried with a screaming hot interior and brown crunchy coating. I know many around me don't care for sauce with bits but this stuff is well made and tastes great on top of the fried veg. Even those who don't like the chunks were dipping around them to get some thinner version.
 

We ordered a steak and three chicken dishes, the francaise, the parmesan and the marsala. The steak looked pretty good hanging out in a thin pan jus and done just as ordered. By all reports it was a success. The francaise was an enormous disappointment to me. The chicken was done just fine and the sauce was rich but was essentially a garlic butter sauce and nearly devoid of white wine and lemon which are what really drive that sauce in my experience. It came with a Tuscan Mash that was fine but unremarkable. The parmesan was a step in a better direction. This time the pasta didn't feature the limp mushiness of the cavatelli from our first visit and the sauce works as well with the chicken as it did the zucchini. I wish they had a ground version, I think my brother would like it, but it will never happen with the large floaty chunks. The chicken wasn't done as well in the parm as the francaise, it had achieved that stringy hard to chew texture in a few places but still the whole thing was miles better than the other.

The real standout surprised me. I like chicken marsala and have had it a number of times. I have never had one quite like this, and for reasons that might typically be a turn off for me, I loved it. All of the familiar notes were there. Butter, astringent but lightly sweet wine, sweetness of brown sugar. What?!? That's for BBQ rubs not Italian chicken dishes. I don't know if it is brown sugar but it couldn't taste anymore like it. Oddly enough, the sweet played very well with the other flavors, kinda like old friends playing on a playground years after their lives had grown apart. It's odd seeing them together but it makes sense when you put it all together. I will have to try it again to see if I like it so much when it is not such a surprise. A much better experience all the way around, but not approaching spectacular, let's say approaching really good.