Title: Spettro
Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: ENU

Spettro in Oakland, CA – update, dinner
Review date: Sept 2013

Our first visit to Spettro was in March 2013, where we found some good dishes and one bad one. Overall, we were pleasantly surprised by this modest neighborhood restaurant, which seemed to offer good value for the money.

We chose to return for another of our weekly dinners with my MIL Inez. Although Spettro doesn't fill up except for weekends, if you want one of the six booths along the wall (three people max) instead of the communal tables, it's best to call ahead of time.

On this visit we did two repeats and two new dishes. The first was the Marblehead salad. Butter lettuce was roughly shredded, tossed with a blue cheese dressing and a generous amount of blue cheese crumbles, a few slices of sweet green apple, and the over-candied walnuts Spettro is fond of. As with the Heart to Heart salad I tried last time, it's very good but overgenerous. The three of us could share it easily.

Sadly, the lamb shank which was simple and comforting on our first visit, this time around suffered from being held a day or two too long. The meat had dried out, and the salty gravy couldn't hide its inferior texture.

We ordered the chicken cannelloni for Inez, which is nicely creamy. With her taste buds failing as she ages, we probably should have shaken atop a goodly amount of their free grated cheese from the shaker that the waitress offered us to give it a little extra salt. These are true rolled wheat-flour crepes, not the stuffed pasta tubes that many people think of.

I decided to try the Chicken Parmesan. You can also get this vegetarian-style as an eggplant parmesan. An oval gratin dish with two thin breaded chicken cutlets is lavishly anointed with a thin, unsalted tomato sauce and close to a half-pound of grated mozzarella and mild cheddar on top. This is a generous plate, accompanied by sides of a half-cup of linguine, in a cream sauce that had no cheese but a dusting of sweet fresh nutmeg; and steamed mixed veggies of zucchini, broccoli, and much-too-old carrots. 

The first two veggies were cooked properly, but those thick slices of carrot would have needed four times the cooking to soften up. They were as close to wood as a carrot can get. Although the plate held a large portion of food, it tasted a little flat due to undersalting, but that's easy enough to correct. With all that cheese, you should note it's a fairly high-fat dish with its old-fashioned execution.

We ordered the vanilla flan for Inez again. All their desserts are large-sized for sharing, but she ate all but two spoonfuls of it for a good showing.

I tried the chocolate mousse, which was just as unsuccessful as all restaurant versions have been in the past twenty years or so. This one had the oddest flavor profile: sweet and yet bitter at the same time, as well as a slightly greasy feeling in the mouth after a few spoonfuls. 

At a guess I would say that Spettro melts semi-sweet morsels in a pan of butter, then adds unsweetened cocoa and leftover burnt coffee. They lighten it slightly with beaten egg whites, then stabilize it with gelatin. Again, that's just my guess – however they make it, it wasn't terribly successful.

For us, Spettro was okay for a one-time fling, but not quite good enough to stay on our "B" list. It's one of those 'go there at your own risk' places: you might luck into a fresh, tasty, great value entrée...but the odds are you probably won't. Their food is the old-style well-cooked (except for those woody carrots) and it doesn't take to multiple reheatings very well, when they can't sell enough plates on any given day.

Service was not quite as efficient this time, although they had sufficient staff on hand; I'm not certain what the problem was. It seemed as though they had two buspersons but only one waitress, when it should have been the other way around. It's possible they were short-handed; Thursday evenings aren't as heavy as weekend evenings but it's easily twice the number that would gather on a Monday or Tuesday. Spettro was almost half-full, and that's a lot of tables for only one waitress to be handling.

This return visit was disappointing. In discussing it afterwards with Carlos, I remarked how we are seeing an increase in small independent restaurants reheating foods that have been held at least a day (or more) past their original cooking. The lamb shank was clearly the product of several reheatings. Although the Chicken Parmesan and the cannelloni were large portions, they were also perilously close in concept/execution to being tired old warhorses that needed some serious updating.

We saw one of the pizzas being delivered to another table; it looked like the thicker crust, old-fashioned type. None of us care for this kind of pizza any longer. 

Spettro is closer in style and price to Crogan's and Bistro 1491 as opposed to Sidebar, Riva Cucina, Zut!, et.al. However, Crogan's and 1491 do a better job than Spettro, being more consistent. Crogan's, bolstered by their bar-drinking regulars, has never served us a dish that tastes reheated-ad-infinitum. 1491 offers more stylish, updated food that succeeds over half the time, which beats both Spettro and Crogan's handily on percentages.

Perhaps if we stuck with persistently working out way through Spettro's menu, we could discover those culinary gems that keep bringing their regulars back. But we're not bargain-hunters – when we look to save money, we traipse off to our favorite ethnic haunts for some Ethiopian, Thai, Mexican or Indian food. 

Three people, dinner: one starter, three entrées, two desserts, two beverages, with tip was $93.

Spettro
3355 Lakeshore Blvd. @Mandana, Oakland, CA
http://www.themenupage.com/spettromenu.html 
Review date: March 2013

Spettro has been around ever since we moved to Oakland. Why we've never tried it, I can't say. We've walked by it dozens of times – it's on the way to Mezze, a restaurant we were once very fond of. I sometimes drive out here to do an hour's worth of walking along Lakeshore, which is a pleasant street to walk along. Spettro is one of those places we're always meaning to try, but never think of when it comes time to get into the car.

But this time I remembered Spettro when choosing a restaurant for our weekly dinner out with my MIL Inez. I checked Yelp and saw that the reviews spanned the usual; some folks love it, others think it's so-so. I marked down the dishes that were recommended, and off we went. 

Spettro isn't on OpenTable, so I was trusting that our eating early on a weekday would be enough to get us a seat. When we arrived, there were only a few diners so we had our choice of seating. The dining room is a long rectangle, with odd little alcoves built along one side. You'd expect them to be banquette seating, but instead there are bistro chairs with round tables. All the other tables in the room are rectangular.

Each alcove fits only three people with this setup. In order to get in, the waiter pushes the table back against the wall. Everybody files in, standing in the corners, then the table is pulled out so one person can sit with their back to the wall, and the other two people sit down opposite one another. To leave, everybody stands up again in the corners and the table is pushed back, making enough room to exit.

Awkward and a little silly, perhaps. But otherwise you might find yourself eating at a semi-communal table, since except for the alcoves and a row of two-tops, all the other tables are arranged to seat exactly eight diners. Since we're never in love with anything that smacks of dormitory dining, we opted for one of the alcoves.

Spettro has a long and slightly odd menu of Italian, American, and Mexican dishes. Yelpers seemed as likely to rave about the lamb shank as the Chile Colorado, which gave us a wide range to choose from.

I chose the Heart to Heart salad: butter lettuce with a raspberry vinaigrette, pears, blue cheese and walnuts. Outside of an excess of dressing – Spettro is only one of a long list of restaurants guilty of this sin – and some overcooked toffee walnuts, I liked the salad a lot. I'm fond of butter lettuce, which isn't often used in restaurants. The vinaigrette was a touch sweet, but getting it served on the side would solve that problem in the future. 

There was a generous amount of diced Bartlett pears at just the right stage of ripeness, and the equally generous amount of blue cheese was outstanding. Most blue cheeses are very salty, and this wasn't. It was similar to a mild Gorgonzola, and contrasted nicely with the vinaigrette. 

Carlos ordered the fried calamari, which came with a mildly spicy marinara sauce for dipping. This is actually an arrabiata sauce, for those who can tell one tomato sauce from another. The calamari was a little overfried and the serving was modest, but overall it was a good starter.

Spettro is apparently famous for using blueberries, using them for BBQ ribs as well as in a mixed green salad. Inez zoomed in on the ribs, as she loves fruit sauces with meat. It comes with mashed potatoes and corn on the cob, both of which also make her favorites list. Sadly, the ribs weren't that good. They are cut in an interesting manner – short lengths of double ribs – but the bark was so hard and overdone, she couldn't eat it. The rib meat was dry and tasteless without the sauce.

Carlos chose the chicken cannelloni, which comes in an oval gratin dish, the cream sauce topped with plenty of browned cheese. Although the crepes aren't large, it's a rich dish. The chicken breast is mixed with sautéed mushrooms and although finely shredded, still has some texture to it. This was very good, although I liked it more than he did.

I ordered the braised lamb shank, which comes with mashed potatoes and small diced carrots. There was plenty of gravy on the plate, too, and the shank was very tender. I thought this was good, but a little plain. After Carlos admitted he liked my lamb more than his dish, we agreed to switch and make both of us happy. The shank was not only tender but large; Carlos brought half of it home.

We ordered the vanilla flan for Inez, which turned out to be a caramel flan. She had only finished half her dinner, claiming she was full, but we've found that it's seldom she's actually so replete that she can't eat dessert. This was one of those times. It was a nice-sized flan with three decorative spoonfuls of whipped cream around the plate. She ate every bit of it.

Carlos and I both opted for the fruit crisp. Tonight it was a mix of blueberries and blackberries, which we asked for a la mode ($2 extra). The topping, a scattering of rather crunchy streusel, was a little too sweet, but the vanilla ice cream (a very large scoop smashed on top of the gratin dish) counteracted that. Not the best crisp, but better than most restaurants manage.

Carlos ordered coffee, which they had brewed in a fresh pot. It was surprisingly good, strong with low acidity.

The waiter was cheerful and efficient, although he was covering the entire room and sometimes was absent. The young manager pitches in to help, however, so dirty dishes were promptly whisked away and we didn't wait too long for water glasses to be refilled. The timing of courses was very good, but although a few more parties came in after us, there were less than a dozen tables occupied while we were there, so the staff was busy but not pressured.

Carlos really enjoyed this restaurant and would like to make it a regular stop for us. He loved the lamb shank (which I don't often make at home) since he likes it tender, large, and with lots of gravy. I thought the food was good, not great, but the prices make Spettro a good value overall. 

Spettro doesn't try to be as upscale as Sidebar or Zza's, while its clientele is clearly more Gen X/young Boomer than Crogan's. People are bringing their kids to Spettro, whereas at Crogan's it's an outing with kids and grandparents, looking for a restaurant that will serve all three generations familiar foods. Crogan's is a holdover from the 1980's, while Spettro froze a little more recently, like around 1998 or 2000. 

We'll definitely return, and do some more picking through the menu. They don't do everything well – that would be impossible at these prices – but the better dishes come pretty close to good home cooking. 

I'd give the edge to Seison/Oakland or Bistro 1491/Albany, but based on an initial visit, Spettro was serendipitous...better than we expected.

Three people, dinner: two starters, three entrees, three desserts (two with extra a la mode), two beverages, with tip was $115.