Salúte Italian Restaurant ReviewsToast of the town!
Salúte raises the bar in Yuba City
By Mike Dunne -- Bee Restaurant Critic
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, May 8, 2005
Why visit Yuba City?
Three words, Salúte Italian Ristorante. Yuba City is about 45 miles north of Sacramento. That's a long way to go for lunch or dinner. But look at it this way: If you get hungry on the way, stop at one of the strawberry stands along Highway 99.
On a recent Friday evening, downtown Yuba City was humming. We weren't sure where everyone was going, but quite a few were ending up at Salúte, which opened in November in a former thrift shop at Plumas and Scott streets.
You can't miss it. The restaurant stands out like a daffodil in a field of dandelions. It's even brighter inside.
The place is partitioned into three rooms, starting with the combination bar and open kitchen. For seizing the attention of newcomers, serious chefs in starchy whites compete with the bar itself, a warm and glowing sheet of Middle Eastern onyx inset into thick mahogany.
Beyond the bar are two casual but exceptionally pretty and buoyant dining rooms. We're seated in the middle room, next to Helaine Feivelson, the Friday night piano player, vigorously filling the joint with upbeat show tunes.
The concrete floor is made to look like tile. Large, ornate frames in various pastels are hung on the yellow walls. There are no pictures in them, but they frame the faint silhouettes of olive trees stenciled on the walls.
The lavender, lemon, mustard and olive color scheme, coupled with a large and sunny mural between bar and dining areas, suggest Provence more than Tuscany, but the music, the conviviality of guests and the overall relaxed tone of the place definitely says "trattoria."
The menu, on the other hand, in keeping with the name and goal of Salúte, is decidedly ristorante, eschewing the unassuming dishes of the traditional trattoria in favor of a cookery more inventive and involved, yet accessible and fun.
Francesco Gazzana is the executive chef. He's from Milan via stops in Naples, London, Antwerp and Sao Paulo, none of which is a likely sister city to Yuba City. But Gazzana had an old Roman pal in Yuba City, Andrea LoJacono, Salúte's manager, who invited him to join the restaurant. "Why not? Let's do it," Gazzana recalls telling LoJacono.
His menu is a varied and spirited take on contemporary Italian cooking. He likes his food natural, colorful and wholesome. Several dishes look familiar, but invariably he gives staples like fried calamari and bruschetta a refreshing spin. Accompaniments with the fresh, snappy and delicately breaded calamari included a sweet and buttery garlic aioli ($9.95). The topping of the bruschetta changes daily, with this evening's composition including bay shrimp, tomatoes and garlic on grilled panini ($7.95).
Salúte may be relatively new, but the people behind it are familiar with Yuba City's duck-hunting heritage, and pay tribute to it with another appetizer as striking for its originality as its forthright flavors - thick, dark slices of smoked duck on buttery slices of smoked scamorza cheese, accompanied with a fruity and spicy "mostarda di cremona," or candied apricot, pear and fig seasoned with mustard ($14.95). The sweetness of the duck's thin layer of fat and the heat of its coating of black pepper was the perfect setup for the fruitiness and bite of the mostarda di cremona.
Duck made a second appearance as an entree, a special of half a roasted bird sweetened with an orange sauce ($19.95). The portion was huge and the cooking was perfect, yielding moist and flavorful meat and a rich and golden skin. I thought the orange sauce, laced with Grand Marnier, a suitably fruity accompaniment, neither too sweet nor too heavy, but that judgment wasn't unanimous at our table, though I agreed with the dissenter that the duck was so flavorful on its own it really didn't need an enhancement.
One appealing aspect of Gazzana's cooking is his attention to detail. The fresh and resonating flavor of a rosemary wine sauce with skewers of grilled lamb virtually upstaged the rich and succulent meat itself ($16.95). Cherry tomatoes whose thin skins had been blistered to curl like the petals of an odd flower brought playful color and lightness to a special of housemade fettuccine with salmon in a sauce zesty with lemon and sweet with mascarpone cheese ($10.95).
On an earlier visit, his fondness for combining the stimulating with the comforting was evident in an entree of 10 fat pan-fried prawns in a fruity tomato sauce both spicy with the heat of chili peppers and sweet with balsamic vinegar ($16.95).
Sometimes, however, he'll play it straight. On that same visit, his light, housemade gnocchi in a buttery sauce redolent with sage was strictly all about comfort ($10.95).
Kyle Gifford is Gazzana's pastry chef, overseeing a diverse assortment of artful desserts. My favorite was a semi-frozen almond mousse whose lightness and creaminess was offset deftly by the richness and crunch of brandied toffee ($4.95). A caramelized pear tart was dark and glossy, the fruit perfectly cooked ($5.95), while a chocolate torte will delight chocoholics in its finely layered prettiness, not necessarily because it has anything profound to say of chocolate ($5.95). Salúte's version of affogato - ice cream in chocolate sauce, fruit puree, liqueur or, as here, espresso - was a letdown because the gelato was fuzzy with the sort of ice crystals that suggest it had melted and been refrozen ($5.95).
Salúte would get high marks for its selection of after-dinner drinks even if all it offered was its light and zingy lemoncello ($5.50), an icy lemon liqueur from the Amalfi coast of Itay, and its smooth and delicately nutty vin santo, a Tuscan dessert wine squeezed from dried grapes and long aged in chestnut barrels ($9.50 with the traditional biscuit cantucci for dipping, $6.50 without). Also available are Scotch, Irish coffee and one of several Italian digestives.
The wine list is being expanded, which will be welcome news to guests hesitant to venture beyond California. As it is now, the list is most exciting in its selection of Italian wines, which include a chardonnay from Puglia, a sauvignon blanc from Friuli and several substantial reds. Prices are appealing, and around a third of the wines are available by the glass.
Hostesses were prompt, warm and not shy about eye contact and easy conversation, while servers were brisk, cheery and attentive, checking in with us at just the right times. On one occasion, however, our server's solicitude lagged near the end of the meal.
Gazzana's partners in the restaurant are Jerzy Blank and his wife Merisha Wazna, who 11 years ago moved to Yuba City from Australia, where in Melbourne they had several businesses including an import company and a language school.
As one of the faster-growing areas in California, Yuba City is the perfect location for the caliber of restaurant they have created, Blank says. From a new cineplex to a plan to plant palm trees down Plumas Street, he adds, Yuba City is thriving, the future is bright. Salúte, indeed.
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