photo: Shannon DeCelle

Keeping It in the Family
By B.A. Nilsson

Villa Valenti

369 West Sand Lake Road, Wynantskill, 283-1291. Serving dinner Tue-Sat 3-9. AE, D, DC, MC, V.

Cuisine: classic Italian

Entrée price range: $11 (spaghetti or ziti) to $21 (filet mignon)

Ambiance: genuinely old-fashioned

Villa Valenti is very old-fashioned. Turn a team of market analysts loose on this place and I’m sure the recommendations would be many: Replace the booths and tables, lose the salad bar, install a plethora of TVs, hang gewgaws from the walls and get rid of the fresh pasta.

Yet it’s every one of those undisturbed features that makes dinner at this restaurant such a pleasure. It’s a formula that works, and has been working pretty much the same way in the 15 years since I last wrote about it—and the 55 years that the restaurant has been in business.

Nothing fancy is going on here, but you’re in a world of comfort as soon as you’re seated, with friendly, knowledgeable servers and a menu of solid Italian fare that is surprising only insofar as the food is so consistently good.

If you spend $13 on the seafood-rich hot antipasto, you’ve hit the highest price on the appetizers menu, where everything else is under $10. With the small but nicely appointed salad bar as part of most dinner orders, the cold antipasto ($10) is a bit superfluous but does offer the cold meats and sharp cheeses you expect from such a platter.

Stuffed mushrooms, stuffed artichoke hearts ($8 apiece), pasta e fagioli and minestre ($7 apiece) highlight the list; we sampled the fried calamari ($8) and found the fish to be wonderfully tender and the finish crunchy and well-served by the accompanying marinara.

Which is as good a time as any to remind you that Villa Valenti’s most popular sauces (traditional, primavera and hot and spicy) are bottled and sold in local supermarkets, with proceeds all going to Prevent Child Abuse America.

Leading the entrée section of the menu is, unsurprisingly, pasta, with lasagna ($15), ravioli ($14) and baked ziti ($12) among the offerings. And there’s fresh, homemade pasta that can be substituted, for a small charge, into a dish; we had tortellini ($2.75) and gnocchi ($2.50) with our entrées, and gloried in the texture. The gnocchi had the consistency, like a thick custard, that makes their little potato dumplings such a treat.

“Our employees make most of the pasta,” manager Ralph Valenti explains, “and I farm out some of it. Basically, if I find someone who makes an excellent product, I’ll use it.” He credits part of his success to a lack of the overhead that plagues other restaurateurs. “This building is paid for, so I have my parents to thank for that. That means I have the budget to spend on the best ingredients I can get.” Which includes the hundreds of pounds of semolina the restaurant uses each week in its pasta making.

Want to go traditional? Dress an order of spaghetti or ziti ($11) with your choice of accompaniment, including peppers, onions, sausage or, as we sampled, meatballs, which are hearty, not too bready, and impressively large.

I passed up a page of chicken-based entrées to try a beef specialty: braciole ($18), in which thin-sliced steak is rolled around a stuffing of herbs and cheese with plenty of garlic to set off the flavor. Topped with tomato sauce, it’s one of the better examples I’ve tasted of this simple but artful dish. (And it’s available in a smaller version as an appetizer, for $8.)

Among the half-dozen veal dishes, the Valenti version of parmigiana ($17) offered no surprise but certainly was no disappointment. It was precisely the dish we expected, with a bonus of the mouth-filling flavor of the tomato sauce over both the veal and the neighboring pasta.

Part of my challenge in visiting restaurants is to put together meals that are representative of what the place has to offer, and this allows me not only to take command of what everybody orders but also to taste their dishes as well. The only person I can’t control as much as I’d like is my daughter, the veal parm fan, so it was with regret that we forewent the veal Rosina ($17), in which medallions of the meat are served in a sherry-laced cream sauce. Next time.

Of course there’s linguine with red or white clam sauce ($17) among the many seafood offerings, but I recommend the pescatore ($21), also available with a red or white sauce. It’s a simmering broth of lobster and crab, shrimp and scallops served over linguine, and the sauce itself is out of this world. The white version mixes white wine and cream, garlicked just to the right notch of flavor.

All of which is a testament to keeping a formula that works well for you. The original Valenti-family restaurant was the Volcano, opened in Troy in 1908 and run for 70 years. During my 1990 visit to Villa Valenti, I spoke with Ralph’s father, now retired. “But we’re keeping it in the family,” he said. “I’m the third generation, and I’m hoping my son, who’s now in high school, will take it over after me.”

He laments the restaurant’s location, which is another thing those market-analyst types would reject, but notes that it’s very difficult to get a table there on weekends. As the many fans of the restaurant already know, it’s worth the drive. We’re trained to throw over the old-fashioned in favor of whatever technology hands us; here’s a good reason to question that dangerous approach to life.

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