Restaurant Bocca
cuisine: Italian
entrées: $15.95-$23.95
address: 190 Main Street, East Haven
phone: (203) 467-9498
credit cards: All major
4 Stars… Special
As a restaurant critic of fourteen years, I have consistently refrained from criticizing restaurants for their high prices. I have always considered meal prices a self-limiting problem. A restaurant that charges excessive prices for its food will soon find itself out of business. But I’m enough of a capitalist to believe that a restaurant is entitled to charge what the market will bear, a reality that restaurant critics who cavil about high prices seem all too ready to ignore. If a restaurant can find enough customers willing to pay its prices, then by definition they’re not excessive—they’re fair, or at least fair market value.
While I may be unwilling to criticize restaurants for high prices, I’m certainly willing to extol those that I believe deliver exceptional value. By this, I don’t necessarily mean cheap establishments. Rather, I mean restaurants that are set apart from others of their ilk by their lower cost, ones that seem to provide almost impossible value for the prices they charge. An eligible restaurant could range from a dirt-cheap taquería to an elegant restaurant with an incredibly generous prix-fixe menu to anything in between. Our website features a category called “Big Bang For The Buck.” Restaurants cannot demand placement there—only our editor can approve it.
As a consumer of fifty years, I am as budget conscious as the next guy or gal. When I’m on my own dime, I’m limited to restaurants that a lowly food writer can afford, so it’s only natural that I seek out great value. My experience, however, is that when I try to find cheaper food, more often than not I find worse food. By and large, one gets what one pays for. Occasionally, one finds a restaurant that really delivers exceptional bang for the buck—and it’s reason to celebrate. Lately, I have made a weekly habit of dining at Restaurant Bocca in East Haven.
East Haven is a town with a bit of an identity crisis. Its sole zip code, 06512, also happens to be one of New Haven’s several zip codes, an anomaly undoubtedly rooted in New Haven’s annexation of a large section of East Haven’s shoreline, a narrow strip running all of the way to Lighthouse Point. East Haven is a town with precious few, if any, restaurants likely to be featured in any but the most local of publications. Probably the Rib House is the restaurant that garners the widest ranging acclaim, but it’s unlikely to cure anyone’s craving for a return trip to Texas or the Deep South.
In fact, East Haven has no restaurants featured in the latest Connecticut edition of the Zagat Survey. Being ignored by Zagat is not, in and of itself, a scathing indictment of a town’s dining scene, because there are numerous gaping holes in the publication’s coverage of the Nutmeg State. In the meantime, an unholy number of New York entries take up precious space in the guide.
To make my case, no restaurant from the town of Bloomfield is included in the current Zagat (despite hosting Ginza, one of Connecticut’s finest Japanese restaurants). Other not insignificant towns like Norwich (Kensington’s in The Spa at Norwich Inn), Colchester (NuNu’s Bistro), North Haven (Ludal) and New London (Zavala), just to name a few, were also deemed unworthy of inclusion despite having noteworthy restaurants, almost making such oversights a badge of honor. Never mind inexplicable individual omissions, like Mickey’s in Hamden, Coco Bongo’s in Ridgefield, or Foe American Bistro and Billy’s Pasta Cosi in Branford. I guess you can only fit so many listings in a slim volume, especially if you’re giving away valuable space to a neighboring state. This is why people should visit our website. It has an almost limitless capacity and we add new restaurants daily.
But back to Restaurant Bocca, which deserves our full and undivided attention. Bocca, which is Italian for “mouth,” has managed to turn disadvantage into advantage as adroitly as our current president squandered world goodwill toward the United States after 9-11. Bocca is pretty well concealed at the back of a strip mall on Main Street near the East Haven Town Hall. “Turn in between the firehouse and the cathouse,” I like to tell friends, knowing that the one thing you can’t get at Zodiac is your horoscope.
Other than serving Italian food that’s better than ninety-five percent of what’s out there, Bocca’s claim to fame is its early bird menu. At Bocca, the early bird gets the metaphoric worm: a highly varied prix-fixe menu that includes choice of drink, choice of a salad or a soup, choice of entrée and choice of dessert for under eighteen dollars. What’s more, the early bird doesn’t have to be especially early—Bocca runs its special from five till seven-thirty seven nights per week. It’s really a triumph of marketing. If Bocca had called it a prix-fixe menu, East Haven’s blue collar townsfolk would probably have turned up their noses at it. But call it an early bird menu and the villagers come carrying torches and pitchforks. (Just kidding, East Haven. I live in town and my daughter graduated from the high school.)
Even when there are entrée specials, they’re included as prix-fixe options at the stated price. There are a few items one can’t order from the early bird menu—a salad, a handful of appetizers and any appetizer specials—but probably three-quarters of the menu is included.
So let me walk you through a Bocca dinner (the only meal this restaurant serves). You can saunter in as late as 7:25 and still tell the staff you want to order from the early bird menu. You’ll find yourself in an attractive dining room with teal blue wainscoting, abstract prints of bold red flowers and droplights with fez-like shades. Sinatra selections seem to make up about half of the tasteful music played over the sound system. The wait staff is quite personable, and it’s not unusual for the chef to circulate around the room late in the evening, making sure everyone is happy.
There’s plenty of reason to be happy. Good “country blend” olives, a head of sweet roasted garlic and crusty, seven-grain bread par-baked by Cottage Bakery and then finished in Bocca’s oven will be brought to your table. These are not the kind of amenities one expects at such reasonable prices. A sign of the changing times, on our most recent visit there was a surcharge of $1.95 for a refill of the bread and roasted garlic. But it’s best not to overdo the bread, because a lot of food will be coming!
You place your order. The entrée option you select determines your meal price, with five each that are $15.95, $16.95 and $17.95. Your beverage options include soda, tea, ice tea, a draft of beer or a generous pour of house wine. Draft beers include Miller Lite, Peroni, Long Trail and UFO Hefeweizen, not exactly the usual swill. House wines include Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon or, for a $1 upgrade, a Tuscan Chianti. I’ve never tried the upgrade because I find the house Merlot quite drinkable. If you prefer a bottle, there’s a surprisingly good wine list ($19-$99) with some good values at the low end (Sterling Vintner’s Collection Chardonnay, Central Coast, California for $26), nice choices in the mid-range (Willamette Vineyards Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley, Oregon for $36) and great selections at the high end (Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley, California for $99).
Your next choice is whether to order the soup du jour, a Caesar salad or the Bocca classic salad. The soups I have tried have ranged from an unremarkable minestrone to a nice cream of mussel to a vibrant tomato and sausage with tortellini. The Caesar salad is a generous portion of romaine lettuce with creamy dressing, Parmesan and housemade croutons. But my favorite is the Bocca salad, which includes mixed greens, green apple matchsticks, cucumber, tomato, crumbled blue cheese and candied walnuts in the perfectly calibrated house vinaigrette.
Amazingly, if you really brought your appetite, you can elect either Bocca’s fried calamari (normally $8.95) or its Parmesan-coated fried zucchini (normally $6.95) for just three dollars. But in point of fact these additions are useful only to those with a hollow leg or a tapeworm.
I have tried several of the entrée options. Some of the pastas utilize the exceptional house tomato sauce (the chef’s mother’s recipe), which is made with San Marzano tomatoes, roasted garlic, basil and oregano. Among the $15.95 group of entrées, I have liked the rigatoni Bolognese and the housemade ravioli, which are stuffed with portobello, spinach, ricotta and toasted pine nuts and then bathed in rich tomato sauce. From the $16.95 group, the cedar salmon in a mustard glaze with oven-roasted Roma tomato is deservedly popular. One would never guess it, but the mixture of stone-ground mustard, honey, molasses and soy sauce used to glaze the salmon, with the addition of olive oil and sherry vinegar, morphs into the house vinaigrette. From the $17.95 group, both the veal Marsala and the broiled sea scallops have proved to be good options. From those respective groups, I haven’t yet tried the zuppa di mussels, the penne shrimp or the cedar sea bass, but I will get to them.
I have also had good luck ordering from the daily specials, including beer-battered cod with a garlic aïoli ($16.95), a house-rolled lasagna and chicken Parmesan combination ($16.95), and sausage and broccoli rabe over cavatappi pasta in the great house tomato sauce finished, as most of Bocca’s pastas are, with either a little olive oil or butter plus Parmesan ($16.95). Plated with the non-pasta items may be terrific buttery mashed potatoes and absolutely perfect slim green beans.
I have tried every one of the dessert options. These encompass a tasty square of carrot cake, a chocolate-shelled cannoli, chocolate brownie à la mode or soft-serve vanilla gelato. By this point in the meal, you may understandably be struggling.
Some of the items not included among the early bird options cry out for attention. One is the crispy prosciutto-wrapped shrimp ($8.95), four tightly wound flutes of flavor served over an absolutely great tomato-and-olive sauce. Another is a pat of crispy-fried goat cheese served with a pair of portobello mushroom caps drizzled with a little balsamic syrup, a bounty of the house salad on the side. Yet another is a generous appetizer special featuring cultivated Maine mussels ($6.95) steamed in marinara sauce with tons of basil and spicy Italian sausage. Nor should you neglect the shrimp papito ($18.95), which features gulf shrimp in a spicy garlic cream sauce with roasted garlic and oven-roasted Roma tomato over linguine. But for the most part, the early bird options include everything one could possibly desire.
Chef-owner Terry Noyes understands that restaurateurs enjoy a fragile relationship with diners. He recognizes that people are looking for value, especially in these perilous times. He does his best not to pass on his rising costs to his customers—and they clearly appreciate it.
Noyes has come up with a winning concept. While his restaurant, tucked away in East Haven, doesn’t seem to garner the press it deserves and probably won’t find its way into Zagat either, Bocca does benefit from terrific word of “mouth.” It’s only fitting.