La Dolce Via has begun serving dinner on Fridays and Saturdays. For those who need to be brought up to speed, let us explain that La DolceVia began as Marcia Sindel supplying desserts to Bar Italia, and eventually became this small and very casual bakery-café in the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood.
Casual is the key word here. There are some places — and despite how much we love them – that we try to steer some of our more hidebound acquaintances away from. This is one of them. It feels like a hangout, there seem to be a number of regulars, and while service is good, some of it in the daylight hours tends to be rather self-. The decor is marginally less casual than it once was; the overstuffed chair and matching ottoman that once beckoned have disappeared, an action that left us mildly disappointed.
Breakfast, brunch and lunch aren’t what we’re going to discuss here, though we will say we have had happy experiences with those meals. In the evenings, the chalkboard menus, toted around by servers and large enough to be easily seen, emphasize first courses. The night we visited, there were three entrees and about a half-dozen appetizers, both hot and cold. However, all the first courses were of generous size, leading us to feel this is a grazing menu, whether by choice or by accident.
For example, the tomato and mozzarella salad was half a dozen center slices of superb local tomatoes, large and red and sweet. A little basil, a little olive oil, and some Greek olives, wrinkled and dark and salty, finished it off. Cantaloupe and prosciutto was a full plate, the melon as ripe as it ought to be in the peak of the season. The ham was a milder cure than one often finds with prosciutto, making for a more equal balance between the flavors. This dish, too, had been drizzled with a little olive oil, a surprise on melon, but it made things more interesting. Foie gras seemed right at home; maybe it was the idea of simple food of the highest quality. A slab—well, okay, a small slab, this is foie gras, after all—rested with slices of fresh bread. From the entrees, scallops arrived seared and sweet, sauced with a little garlic, tomato and white wine, worthwhile, to say the least.
A large handful of wine bottles is poised on the counter, with generous by-the-glass pours at modest prices. The wines are friendly and tasty, comfortable with meals, and mostly very good values.
There are those who can leave La Dolce Via without having dessert, but we’re not among them. German chocolate cake displayed chocolate that was darker than usual, the cake light and moist and full of the contrasting textures that it always brings, what with coconut and pecans in the filling. Continuing the coconut theme, a piece of coconut cake—yellow cake, white icing—was also moist, lighter and less assertive in its flavor, and the frosting fluffier than the standard butter cream, adding to that lightness. The best thing to do when choosing dessert, we’d add, is to get up and press one’s nose against the various cases to see what irresistible lure is poised there.
Ramon Cuffie is in the kitchen, and he can do more complicated food well, and that is available, too. For a rather late dinner, we went in a different direction. But La Dolce Via satisfies on all levels. Need proof? As we were leaving, a local wine merchant arrived, bottle in hand, for an after-work supper outside on the new patio.
La Dolce Via
4470 Arco Ave. at S. Taylor Ave.
314-535-1699
Breakfast & Lunch Tues.-Sun, Dinner Fri.-Sat. Brunch Sun.
Credit cards: All major
Wheelchair access: Poor
Smoking: No
