photo:B.A. Nilsson

Feels Like Home
By B.A. Nilsson

Santino’s Italian-American Restaurant

183 Troy-Schenectady Road, Latham, 220-9900. Serving dinner Tue-Thu, Sun 3-10; Fri-Sat 3-11. AE, D, DC, MC, V

Cuisine: traditionally American Italian-American

Entrée price range: 8 (pasta with pomodoro sauce) to $21 (filet mignon)

Ambiance: large tables; Sinatra songs

Shelley Francella has been in the restaurant business in the area for 30 years, noting the foibles and pitfalls of other people’s eateries. When she decided to open her own restaurant—an event that took place last December—her ambition was to get as far from the chain joints as possible.

“I want to have a place where people know your name,” she explains. “Where you can come in and feel like home.” So she places an unusual (for the area) emphasis on service, even as she has put together a menu featuring items made with fresh food obtained, when and where possible, from local purveyors.

“I want this to be a mom-and-pop place,” she says of Santino’s Italian-American Restaurant. “Something that helps the little people.”

You’ll find the deceptively small-looking place on a rise overlooking Troy Schenectady Road in Latham, beside the moribund Kmart.

The menu stays on very safe ground, letting you start with the usual barside appetizers and then offering two or three preparations apiece of chicken, veal, beef or vegetarian fare ($14-$21). A few more seafood and pasta dishes round things out ($8-$19). There’s also a listing of burgers (cooked to your specification, $7) and sandwiches ($7-$10) for smaller- commitment meals, and all-around favorites like fish and chips ($13) or a hot meatball sandwich ($7).

What do you get? Some very nice choices of preparation and presentation. We started, as we often do, with the Soup Test. Does the minestra del giorno show the personal touches that distinguish it from the run-of-the-mill?

The bean-based soup we sampled ($3) was thick and enriched with the flavor of pancetta, as well as evidence of greens. With not a lot of salt, its very nice flavor results from a skilled combination of the other ingredients.

When the fried calamari ($9) arrived, we were pleasantly surprised to see that it lacked the batter coating that so often makes this dish indistinguishable from, say, fried clams. Instead, the rings are breaded—sparingly—and sautéed, then served on a bed of spinach, with the flavors of olive oil and hot peppers peeking through. Even the chicken-wings fan at my table, who’d been lamenting my refusal to order yet another damn dish of those things (but they’re $8 for a dozen), was won over by the little flavor surprises the calamari imparted.

Salads are served with any entrée order. They’re fresh and sport a pleasant variety of ingredients, with a garlic-based house dressing that I’d be happy to have at home.

Penne, linguine and cappellini are the available pastas, and your choice can be topped with a simple pomodoro (tomato and basil, $8), or fleshed out with meatballs or sausage ($10). To get fancier, try the pasta Florentine ($12), which adds spinach and cheese to the tomato; if you want to add chicken or shrimp to that addition, you’ll pay $4 or $6 more, respectively.

Broccoli Alfredo ($12) has the appeal of taking a rich-with-cream and bad-for-the-arteries classic and dressing it up with a façade of healthful respectability by adding everybody’s favorite green vegetable. We enjoyed the result, although we longed for more cheese in the recipe to give it a thicker sauce (I don’t believe any egg yolks went in there, as they do in a traditional Alfredo), or at least a container of freshly grated cheese on the table. This is another dish you can chicken- or shrimp-enhance for the fee noted above.

What won me over on the plate of bourbon-glazed sirloin ($20), believe it or not, was the stack of grilled squash. Fat circlets of the yellow and green varieties bore the marks and flavor of a quick sear over high heat, and gave me psychological assurance that the meat, too, would be tasty.

It was, and it was cooked to the most perfect state of medium rareness I’ve seen in a long time. Ac companying it were chunky mashed potatoes that bore the fancy swirl of a trip through a pastry bag, although how they managed this without clogging the serrated tip beats me.

You know the standard presentation of Italian-themed meat dishes: You get a plate with the meat and possibly a vegetable on the side; you get a bowl of accompanying pasta. Chicken marsala ($15) was presented differently. The fat chunks of meat, sautéed and finished in the sweet wine of its moniker, were served right on top of the pasta (cappellini, in this case, which we chose in order to more fully integrate noodles and sauce with one another). So instead of tomato sauce, we had the marsala flavor in and around the whole dish, which was a pleasant change from routine.

The servers are young and there are many of them, assuring that you’ll be greeted when you enter and well-minded once you sit. Although it’s a fairly straightforward station-based system, our waiter was helped by others when necessary. We knocked him off routine by having a latecomer during a visit, but he recovered quickly and got us back on track, getting some elusive salads out quickly when he discovered his error.

Although we declined desserts, there’s something called Big Fat Chocolate Cake that sells for $7.50 and looks like something that mutates in the moonlight. No doubt I will fall victim to a craving that will return me some day for a portion of it.

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