Dining Out

Charismatic Corso Prepare to Tuck Into Florentine Delights

   Good food at appropriate prices—that’s the bottom line for most people when they go out to eat. But a great restaurant calls diners back with more than a material equation. Call it “feel.” It’s that intangible quality you sense in the timbre of Billie Holiday’s voice or the mood of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.
   Wendy Brucker and Roscoe Skipper know something about feel. Their Rivoli Restaurant on Solano Avenue in Berkeley is a subtly appointed sanctuary of calm elegance, highlighted by a picture-window view into a tranquil garden. Their new enterprise, Trattoria Corso, which opened in June at the southern edge of Berkeley’s gourmet ghetto, does not replicate Rivoli’s peaceable kingdom. But the spirited 60-seat storefront, which looks out on Shattuck Avenue from the space formerly occupied by Phoenix Pastificio, effuses warmth and congeniality and serves delicious and comforting fare that provides the foundation of feel.
    Corso’s public debut might not have been the best time to get a read on the restaurant’s personality, what with Rivoli regulars, East Bay foodies and first-night Yelpers lining up before the doors opened and amplifying their buzz of anticipation into an impenetrable roar of conversation. The service was slightly higgledy-piggledy, but the chefs were already up to speed on what we sampled of the dishes developed by Brucker and sous chef Rodrigo da Silva (who oversees the kitchen), and Robin and I zeroed in on several items from the six-part menu—parsed into antipasti (starters), primi (soups and pasta), secondi (entrees), pizze, contorni (salads and vegetables, legumes and polenta) and dolci (desserts)—that we would further investigate on subsequent visits in September and October.
    The cuisine reflects the deep love for Florentine cooking that Brucker cultivated during her many trips to Tuscany with her father, Renaissance Florence scholar and UC Berkeley professor emeritus of Italian history Gene Brucker. Preparations range from long-cooked, such as the braised beef and pork sugo (ragu) stirred into tagliatelle ($14) to relatively quick, such as the pan-fried boned Hoffman Farms chicken breast ($10) that is drenched in bubbling, extra-rich Plugrá butter just before it is served.
    Sitting at prime chef-watching seats at the granite bar at the small open kitchen, we witnessed this last coup de grace delivered with brown butter on the wonderful pansotti (two large, hand-folded ravioli squares filled with butternut squash and ricotta, oven-cooked and sprinkled with walnuts and sage, $12); and with Tuscan olive oil on other dishes, including the pillowy gnocchi with a luscious melt-in-your mouth ragu of Sonoma County duck spiked with tangy Gaeta olives ($16). That night, we cobbled together the chicken breast, ravioli and gnocchi into an immensely satisfying meal along with lattuga Romana ($5), a Caesar-like salad of romaine lettuce, croutons and anchovy-lemon vinaigrette, a side of fresh spinach ($6) sparked with garlic and red pepper flakes, and an ample scoop of chocolate gelato ($2.50) washed down with intense cappuccino ($3.50) and espresso ($2.50).
    Other meals (one on a crowded night with a long wait for tables; another when the financial markets meltdown kept all but a dozen diners home) featured the absolutely-must-have fagioli brasati ($7), fresh shelling beans in olive oil; simultaneously soft and crusty baked polenta with mascarpone and Parmesan ($5); thin, bubbly, cracker-like-crusted pizzas (with mozzarella, tomato and basil, $9; mushroom, fontina and Piave and white truffle oil, $13); and plump, juicy house-made fennel sausages ($16) served with soft polenta and caramelized onions and sweet cherry peppers. (The sausages, available at lunch, were on the dinner menu because a party of 10 at the central communal table had ordered up all the grilled bone-in pork loin chops, $16.) From the dolci selections, which include pastry chef Laura Nicoletti’s chocolate torte ($6), seasonal fruit tart ($7) and olive oil cake ($7), we loved the baked pear ($7) with almond streusel and ginger, and the pricy but revelatory gelato ubriaco ($10)—vanilla gelato in a pool of Limoncello di Sironi, a super-tart liqueur made in-house by the chef, Michael Sironi, with whom we chatted quite pleasurably during two of our dinners.
    I’m convinced that we will someday eat our way through every dish, from the marinated olives ($3), da Silva’s house-cured salumi selection ($14) and the crostini trio (toasts topped with fava bean purée, chicken liver, white anchovy with herbs, $12) right through the grilled whole fish (A.Q.) and the platter-filling T-bone steak ($36) to the affogato (gelato and espresso, $6) and biscotti and vin santo ($12.50).
    Corso’s dining areas are casual and comfortable—the gray walls simply decorated with framed menus mostly from trattorias in Florence; Italian movies screening on a TV above the bar. But whether going whole hog on a multi-course meal or popping in for small plates and a taste, half-glass, glass, carafe or bottle of wine (we’re hooked on the Marzemino Terre di Gioia Trentino, $8 per glass, from Skipper’s superb, reasonably priced list), we would almost always choose to sit at the “kitchen counter”—for the entertaining show, the attentive service and the enlightening conversation. It’s ground zero for Corso’s charismatic feel.

THE DETAILS

TRATTORIA CORSO. Italian. 1788 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, (510) 704-8004, www.trattoriacorso.com. Serves lunch 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Mon.–Fri.; dinner 5 p.m.–10 p.m. daily; brunch 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Sat.-Sun. Credit Cards, Full Bar, Wheelchair Accessible, $-$$$$

—By Derk Richardson
—Photography by Deborah Sherman