Della Collina comes to us via a recommendation from Ponkan, who went there for a work dinner (nice job pulling that one off!). It’s a nice modern Italian place, with ambience and service that will appeal to people with certain quality expectations, and nice food at decent prices.
One mildly unfortunate point is that you can’t choose from too many options if you get the fixed-price courses (which are cheaper than you’d expect given the quality of the room and service). Three pastas, two mains. The starter was competent, maybe a bit boring (mortadella, roasted pepper, olives), but also included a very nice snapper carpaccio with light dressing. The suited maitre d’ was very suave about explaining what everything was (in English, as much as possible)
The best-sounding pasta was a thin linguine with tomato sauce enriched with sea urchin (‘enriched’ is a word that indicates you’re trying hard to write about food. It means the other ingredient was put into the sauce.). The sauce was very sweet and thus a bit artificial; this tastes good and is not something you would think to do in home cooking. One disappointment was that the uni was fully-cooked; I wondered if it would be possible to stir it in at the end, like fresh ricotta, so it would still taste fresh. I was also reminded of the cold pasta with uni at Yonemura, which I would like to make once the weather is warmer.
Mains were small but pleasing, as they say. The house special is to roll a filet of white fish in kataifi (shredded phyllo dough) and roasted. Nice stuff. There was also veal, very soft, but flavorful. Small, so you could eat them both, but still…
Desserts were not especially interesting, but seeing banana tiarmisu was probably a first for me. Not something that I need to repeat, particularly. And coffee was quite good; for some reason mine had a snowman drawn into the foam on top. All in, fans of Italian would certainly not be disappointed here. All others, consider a bit more carefully.
The web site is very cute too.
03-3714-8855