David K.
Yelp
The outdoor seating area surrounding Al Vicolo Pizza&Vino featured a red carpet and dazzling strings of Christmas lights overhead. This super popular pizzeria turns out gigantic, oversized pies and other dishes including charcuterie boards and salads. One of their most unique pizza selections was the Via Plebiscito, which came topped with tomato sauce, mozzarella, peppers, oregano, and slices of horse meat (a delicacy of Catania!). We also added on porcini mushrooms and crushed pistachios to the pizza, which was large enough to feed a small army! The most interesting part of the pizza was the horse meat, whose taste and texture was almost indistinguishable from beef. Overall, however, the execution of this pizza could definitely have been better--the thin crust was overloaded with wet toppings and turned into a soupy mess. Next, we had the Dirillo salad, whose individual components were plated in separate ramekins and brought out on a single wooden board. The center of the board featured a bowl of lamb's lettuce, surrounded by ramekins of radicchio, grilled eggplant, cherry tomatoes, walnuts, pineapple slices, Grana Padano cheese, and slices of bresaola, an air-dried beef sausage. Along with the salad came olive oil and Balsamic vinegar for dressing, and a basket of chewy focaccia bread, baked from the same dough used for the pizzas. The ingredients of the salad were fresh and well-balanced, from the saltiness of the cheese and bresaola to the earthiness of the radicchio, eggplant, and walnuts, to the refreshing bite of the tomatoes and pineapple. While the pizza we had here could've been, this restaurant made for a great dining experience nonetheless in a super elegant outdoor setting.
