Ristorante Panorama

What's better for Valentines Day dinner than a romantic restaurant, with an award winning wine list and superb italian fare that you can walk to?

Ristorante Panorama has been at Front and Market for many many years and something tells me that the traditional italian menu hasn't changed much over the years. I'd guess the same of Luca Sena's other Old City italian eatery La Familigia. If its not broke, don't fix it.

Mr. Sena's newest restaurant, Revolution House, will be opening soon in the storefront formerly known as the Snow White diner. The rumored decor and menu at Revolution House will lean more towards family style meatballs and gravy type fare.

Ristorante Panorama has been on our restaurant list since we moved into the neighborhood a year ago. Our virgin visit was being saved for a special occasion, Valentines Day.

Although 95 lies just outside the front door of the classy hotel/restaurant, once inside the cozy dining room, complete with a large Tuscan inspired mural, old world candelabras, and crisp white table linens, its easy to forget about interstates, and traffic, and parking and work.

Panorama is known for their wine list and wine preservation system. They've won numerous awards for not only the size of their wine cellar, but the unique dispensing system that they use which enables them to keep 120 bottles open and fresh for an extended period of time. We were also pleasantly surprised by the creative cocktail offerings.

We began with two choices from the Antipasti menu; Escargots in a butter, tomato and garlic sauce and a standard Antipasti Misto platter. The Escargots were plump and tender, and really absorbed the garlic flavor, making it easy to forget that you're actually eating snails. The Antipasti Misto was well presented and not overloaded with too many items.

For our main course we tried the Pappardelle with a Duck Ragu and a traditional Sicilian Braciole. In a dish such as the Pappardelle its important to not drown out the duck with too much tomato. Panorama's dish was spot on with their proportions. There was just enough tomato so as not to dry out the duck. Yet there wasn't too much, and the sweet buttery duck meat taste really came through with every bite.

Ordering the Braciole was an experiment. When the waiter described it as flank steak, wrapped around a hard boiled egg, then simmered overnight in marinara, we simply couldn't resist. Coming from an Irish family where "italian" means spaghetti and meatballs, the concept of wrapping meat around a egg and letting it simmer for a while was completely foreign and intriguing.

The experiment was a success! The meat was tender, yet still able to somehow stay wrapped around a perfectly formed hard boiled egg. Once again the sauce to meat ratio was just right. It seems to us like the kind of dish that could be majorly screwed up if not executed properly.

By the time desert arrived we were pretty much stuffed, but we ordered anyway. The cannolis were exactly what you'd expect from a fine italian restaurant. Real ricotta cheese filling in a perfectly baked shell. No fancy chocolate sauce to distract from the sweet cheese and crunch.

Another important thing to note about our dinner was that we were there for over two hours. Sometimes when restaurants are fully booked, like Panorama was last night according to Open Table, the wait staff, whether instructed to or not, may rush things a bit, in order to ensure proper turnover. Panorama did an excellent job of pacing the meal. I guess when you live two blocks away you don't have to worry about parking meters and the trek home either, which adds to the fine dining experience.

Now that we've been there, its not hard to see why Ristorante Panorama has been there for so many years and why they'll probably be for many more to come.