The Italian you almost forgot

Sometimes dining is about broadening horizons, challenging the palate, soaring to new heights of gustatory intrigue. Other times it’s about what’s familiar, comfortable and, hopefully, delicious.

Open the door at Enrico’s, tucked into a side street just west of Keystone at 62nd Street, and you’ll know you’re in for the latter. Maybe it’s the heavy, over-the-top décor, the dressing screens flocked with fake ivy, Chianti bottles in grass skirts or Rembrandt lithographs looming over the dining room. Perhaps it’s the expert waitress who keeps the entire wine list in her head, offering to re-cork the bottle to take home if you can’t drink it all.

Whatever it is, Enrico’s oozes a vintage charm. A meal here unfolds like a series of scenes from your youth, set to familiar melodies. Just as we were digging into our appetizer of toasted mushroom ravioli ($7.95), dipping the parmesan-crusted edges into a deep-red marinara sauce, the placid strumming in the background took shape, and we realized we were listening to “Mandy,” the Barry Manilow standard, reinterpreted on Italian guitar. Later, it would be the soundtrack to The Godfather. Just in case you didn’t know, Enrico’s is Italian.

Unfortunately, no one had asked our smoking preference, and our musical reverie was interrupted by the telltale crackle of a diner lighting up at a nearby table. This was one vestige of restaurant life we had hoped to leave in the past.

Opened 14 years ago and named both for a favorite customer of the original owner and the legendary tenor Caruso, Enrico’s appeals to the mid-century Italian immigrant cuisine popular before Mario Batali and movies like Big Night made us feel somehow guilty for liking it. But there’s integrity to Enrico’s approach, and current chef and owner, Stuart Lester, who bought the place almost three years ago, has worked hard to refine the menu and kitchen protocol. Under his attentive eye, no detail is too small.

Before we had even decided on a wine, warm, chewy rolls arrived with both a soft garlic-herb butter and a cruet of flavored oil. Lester delivered the bread himself. Then our very genial waitress, who turned out to be Lester’s wife, Nikki, arrived, offering wine suggestions, even knowing how many bottles of each vintage were left. She steered us toward a Sartori Valpolicella ($27/bottle), a light, complex Italian red she guaranteed would go with everything. She was right.

Salads and soups also demonstrated Lester’s care. A house salad offered a crunchy mix of greens with plenty of cool cucumbers in a delicious house dressing that’s like ranch with a little oregano. But the soup, a tomato bisque, was the real winner, a deeply complex elixir of tomatoes and cream with little bits of celery and onion and a subtle undertone of garlic. Magnifico!

Few restaurants serve veal as many ways, and all of them sounded delicious. One of the lighter preparations, the veal saltimbocca ($18.95), comes with prosciutto (“Italian ham,” the menu puts it simply), sage and white wine with butter. The veal was tender, without being overcooked, and the sauce, though plentiful, didn’t weigh things down. Three crunchy green beans and a firm floret of cauliflower completed the presentation. This was restraint at its finest, before pasta bowls became “bottomless” and pizza joints “all you can eat.”

You might not associate rainbow trout with the Adriatic, but at Enrico’s it comes either with a lobster cream ($17.95) or a Marsala sauce flecked with pine nuts ($16.95). We went for the lobster sauce, which topped the flaky fish with those star-crossed lovers lobster and butter and the crunch of toasted almonds. Both entrées came with a small bowl of angel hair pasta in marinara. It was an almost inconsequential accompaniment, but the pasta was al dente and the sauce utterly comforting.

If our waitress had had her way, we never would have left, tempted by her charm to eat just one more bite before she took our plates or order one more course before we stumbled out, sated, into the parking lot. So, of course, we ordered a chocolate cannoli and a limoncello on the rocks just for good measure. They don’t make the cannoli shells at Enrico’s, but the house-made filling is a silky, slightly bittersweet concoction of ricotta and cocoa without the typical chalky aftertaste of many cannoli fillings. We ate every bite.

Though our party closed the deserted restaurant on a weeknight, our waitress assured us that loyal but sometimes capricious crowds did come, sometimes early, sometimes late. It would be easy to miss Enrico’s with all of the more aggressive, visible chains on nearby Keystone Avenue. But Lester plans to expand next year into the space next door that currently houses the Hideaway bar. Thankfully, he’ll keep the décor and the menu the same on the other side. Two times a good thing ought to be divine.