Paul W.
Yelp
I wanted a great Italian lunch, and seeing the award for best in Silicon Valley had me trying the place. The parking here is plentiful but slightly tricky. There is a garage entrance half a block away that you can park in, but continue out the first exit to get to the outdoor spaces closer to the restaurant. And if you do use the garage, go around the back way to the door instead of under the sign at Skyport, it's a shorter distance.
For my food, it started with a side salad, dressed perfectly (no puddles but flavoring was perfect) and all ingredients were fresh. Best part of the meal. For the main, I ordered the mild Frutti di Mare, mixed seafood linguini. I'd describe it as light, clean, and fresh. Perfectly cooked pasta and seafood and not a lick of seafood grit anywhere. Shrimp were large and well-cleaned. My only minor issue was the fresh julienned basil on top was not spread out well; I got a forkful of clumped basil while I ate, but otherwise again very tasty.
Servers were excellent, checked on me enough and kept my drink full. One thing that surprised me was while the server does grind fresh pepper at the table for you, they unfortunatley do not grind fresh parmesan. Instead they have table shakers of the canned grated kind, like at pizza parlors. Again, though, this is minor.
I got a creme brulee for dessert, the fresh fruit topping was nice, and it was well-set and not overly sweet (just how I like), but a few spots on the caramelized top were a bit over-torched, leading to bitter burn taste on just a bite or two of it (most of the rest was fine).
Still, this place was good enough for me to want to return, and overall I was quite happy with the meal and service. Integrate a table-service parmesan grater and a few very minor fixes and the place would be the bees knees.