What: Verde Luna
Where: 115 Tudor Street, Hamilton
Prices: Breads, $4 to $7; entrees, $12 and $18; pizzas, $10 to $16 and $14 to $20; pasta, $9.90 to $18 and $14 to $24; mains, $18 to $33
Chef: Peter Palmieri
Wines: Limited wine list
Hours: Seven days from 11am till late
Vegetarian: One pizza, four pasta
Bookings: 4961 3949
Bottom line: Entrée, main, dessert for two, without wine, about $100
It's been a long time coming. Anyone venturing west along Tudor Street from Beaumont Street over the past few years would be forgiven for thinking this local Italian was destined never to see the light of day again. But the renovations are finished, and just in time.
The word must have got out because on a Saturday night just a couple of weeks before Christmas the place is filled with large groups of revellers. Service is so fast and furious that sometimes the kitchen just can't keep up.
The menu offers various breads, two dishes each of prawns or mussels, steak with a choice of three toppings and four chicken mains, as well as entrée- and main-sized pastas and pizzas.
Desserts are mainly cakes and tarts from the refrigerated display cabinet and the wine list is still a work in progress.
The kitchen is being challenged because tonight everyone is ordering veal and it's all cooked to order. Meltingly tender, thin slices are quickly seared and presented in three classic Italian styles - with a marsala sauce, saltimbocca or alla pizzaiola - or as the ubiquitous veal schnitzel.
Veal marsala ($21.90) is usually only as good as the wine used - a wine on the dry side is considered the best. The generous serve of creamy sauce is a little sweet for my taste but the abundance of mixed mushrooms and quality of the veal more than compensates. Sauteed zucchini provides some balance.
Small, sweet black mussels get a couple of treatments - the more traditional chilli, tomato, onion and basil or the unusual but winning combination of ginger and garlic, white wine and pernod stock ($18). You either love or hate aniseed but to my mind when combined with seafood, it's a marriage made in heaven. And the broth left in the bowl is not too salty to finish off every last drop.
I prefer my pasta sauces to be fresh tasting and not weighed down with cream or too much cheese. The Sicilian ($16 and $22) delivers the goods. Al dente linguini strands come tangled with a generous dose of prawns, calamari, mussels and fish. Each strand is coated lightly with garlic, shallots and chilli-spiked sauce and speckled with herbs.
You could easily make an adequate meal by choosing from the 10 pizzas on offer as they come in two sizes. The crusts are crisp and not too thick and all the usual suspects are there - capriciosa, marinara, Mexican, Hawaiian, supreme, meat lover's, peperoni. The vegetarian ($12 and $16) is topped with cubes of eggplant, diced onion, chunks of red capsicum, diced tomato, whole olives and slivers of spinach. The topping of browned and melted bocconcini pulls away in strings with each bite.
There are plans to introduce a wider range of dishes from around the Mediterranean region.
Whatever happens under a green moon (Verde Luna) I predict return visits will be more often than once in a blue moon.
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