Tampa's newest hotel restaurant supplies guests, shoppers and discerning diners with savory Italian dishes cooked with imagination and flair.
By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published September 2, 2004
[Times photos: Douglas R. Clifford]
Executive chef Fabrizio Schenardi, showing off a rack of lamb with pistachio crust and fig sauce, knows there’s more to Italian than tomatoes, oregano and garlic.
Desserts at Pelagia Trattoria are a treat, flavored with innovative tastes.
The approach to our newest hotel is a bit messy and the interior is not yet lived-in, reflecting that an ambitious project is under construction at its first floor restaurant, Pelagia Trattoria.
When established, it will give the shopping mall menu of International Plaza its first fine restaurant and give a much-needed invigorating kick to local Italian dining and hotel restaurants. It's an odd setting for this. Although the name Pelagia evokes the Greek sea, the restaurant and its faux Tuscan hotel sit in an ocean of asphalt facing the backside of Nieman Marcus.
Yet, though the hotel is done in the standard salmon and cream color scheme, Pelagia explodes in vivid blues, greens and oranges in ancient tile and futuristic glass that would shake Chihuly.
Within this, the culinary architect is Fabrizio Schenardi, who cooks up the robust traditional flavors of Italy, with a strong whiff of the Mediterranean and a big dash of Spain. So he supplies the lobby with the cured olives of his childhood in the groves outside Turin - and festoons the menu with California styling picked up at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and Maui.
He knows there's more to Italian cooking than tomatoes, oregano and garlic (not that there's anything wrong with those) and that there's room between red-checked tablecloth pizzerias and gilded big bucks spots for splashy, casual Milano moderno.
Pelagia starts with simple combinations, such as honey with a sturdy cheese. Yes, although the cheese here is Spanish Manchego, the indulgence is classic in Parma (where they also add butter to prosciutto). Your cheese lust more modern? Consider Gorgonzola after dinner with a jalapeno jam.
Schenardi has a short but savory list of similar stuzzichini, teasing tapas-sized helpings of strong flavors, from a salty sardine potato cake and big fried, stuffed olives to the cold veal in tuna sauce I love.
Larger appetizers elaborate on that same zest rather fancifully. Panzanella is reconstructed with the salad of bread, tomato and cucumber pressed into a tower wrapped with thin tomato slices, unnecessary but fun. Calamari is rethought, too: grilled, not fried, sliced and tossed with shaved fennel. Cinnamon sweetly perks up grilled quail (it could bear more fire) on cold lentils, a worthy low carb trick.
Most entrees, Italian or otherwise, get similar twists, mushrooms, nuts and purees, subtle and wild. Or both, like the cocoa that darkens pasta noodles for an osso buco ragu: no real chocolate taste, but the overall flavor is deeper (and I might add chili, as the Mexicans do). The scallops were simpler, on white beans and zinged with a basil lime syrup, and still met my rarely met demands. Five big ones, not a measly three, were seared briefly and perfectly, crisp-edged and pink inside. The salmon was a touch overcooked, as is usually the case.
The breads are well-done, snap-crackle good breadsticks, olive loaf and baguette, except when we accidentally got a half-eaten basket. The pastry chef has a tasty imagination in dessert too, adding piney rosemary to the caramel and almonds of an apple phyllo tart. Exquisite authentic gelato comes from the Milanese gelateria in the mall's Bay Street.
Dramatic stuff - not cheap, but especially welcome in a casual restaurant that feeds hotel guests and mallgoers three meals a day. Breakfast has its own splash: lemon souffle pancakes, rock shrimp hash and panetonne French toast with mascarpone. You bet I'll be back.
For now, Schenardi patrols the line keenly as servers and cooks learn his lessons. They will, and I will be delighted to watch.
Milan wasn't built in two weeks, but it's great start.
