"If Cafe Italiano's name brings to mind a quaint little neighborhood restaurant with red-and-white checked tablecloths, you will want to revise your thinking.
This is a pretty, charming spot where white linen dresses the tables, starched peach-color napkins match the sponge-painted walls, and the lunch hour attracts a smartly attired crowd.
On a recent afternoon, sunlight poured in through an abundance of windows at the Englewood Cliffs restaurant. The dining area is divided by a center hall, allowing smokers and nonsmokers their separate pleasures, and pleasant waterscapes adorn the walls. The menu offers a generous selection of appetizers, salads, and entrees, but my lunch companion and I picked specials from the printed insert. Each came with soup or salad.
Before we ordered, our waiter brought a gratis plate of bruschetta, rounds of garlic toast topped with chopped tomato and red onion.
I chose the grilled shrimp, my companion, the fish a la Riviera. He selected scrod but could have had halibut. My salad was a mixture of red-leaf lettuce with red cabbage, dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. My companion's vegetable soup was light and pleasant, if not memorable.
My shrimp, four of them, came perched atop individual rounds of garlic toast, which rested on a bed of cold cannellini beans and red onion, the large, white plates dusted with parsley confetti. My friend's scrod was bathed in a lovely, tangy sauce flavored with sun-dried tomato, mushrooms, and black olives. Slices of potato, onion-wrapped and browned, accompanied it.
Our desserts - a creamy square of not-too-sweet tiramisu and a slice of custard-and-cream-filled raspberry-topped spongecake - served with espresso were a lovely ending to a lovely rneal."