Shannnon DeCelle

Just Like Mom Used to Make
By B.A. Nilsson

Mama’s Family Restaurant

Routes 146 & 146A, Clifton Park, 371-7313. Serving Sun noon-9, Mon 11-9, Tue-Thu 11-10, Fri 11-11, Sat 11-10. AE, D, MC, V.

Cuisine: pizza and easygoing Italian fare

Entrée price range: $8 (meatless pasta) to $17 (stuffed garlic clams)

Ambiance: comfortable

Mama is not at Mama’s any more. Stephanie Van Auken presided there for some 22 years, but sold the place about two months ago to Matt Williams, who hasn’t really changed much about the restaurant.

It’s a somewhat lonely outpost amid a sea of chain restaurants and fast-food outlets in Clifton Park, and, with that level of competition, it holds its own. There’s an extensive menu in addition to pizza selections, and you have the option of take-out with all of the items.

Eating in is more comfy than you’d guess from the outside of the diminutive building. Nothing fancy, but you won’t suffer the phalanx of TV sets and/or fatuous wall decorations you’d see in such joints as Applebee’s or Ruby Tuesday. And the menu here is more reasonably priced.

Our server thoughtfully mentioned that to order antipasto with a salad bar yonder would be excessive, and so we instead sampled other appetizers with a platter of samples ($8). You already know what’s coming: fried mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers and jalapeno poppers and a few cheese-rich, bacon-encrusted potato skins. We ate of them sparingly, having learned from long experience that they tend to take over the appetite. (As a next-day leftovers treat, they fare poorly when microwave reheated.)

Besides, the salad bar beckoned. It’s a standard-fare assembly, but with a generous array of side salads. The greens are fresh and the bar was freshened frequently during the time of our visit. It’s definitely a two-trips kind of array, especially if you want to keep your green salad and items like pasta salad separate.

If you’d rather have a served-at-the-table salad, they’re available in the dinner, chef’s, chicken Caesar and Buffalo chicken varieties, priced from $5 to $10 depending upon size and complexity.

You have a cornucopia of other appetizers, soups, salads, subs, burgers, wings and the like in addition to more formal entrées to choose from, abetted by a specials list that changes regularly. The personality of your meal will depend on what you want to get out of the place, but it will be casual and the food won’t offer any surprises. This place is about items like pasta Milano and pizza.

Pasta Milano ($15) mixes large shrimp with broccoli florets and decorations of red peppers and prosciutto over a big bowl of linguine. The flavors speak for themselves, boosted with plenty of garlic. It’s a huge serving, and can be split for two for an extra $4.

A number of similar dishes fall under the menu’s “gourmet pasta” category, like angel hair with broccoli ($11), fettuccine Alfredo ($12, add chicken or shrimp for $4), and linguine with clam sauce ($12).

Meat-based entrées include chicken and eggplant—including a multi-sized chicken parmigiana, which ranges from an 8-ounce serving ($10) to a four-cheese-topped pound ($16). In the all-things-to-all-diners category, you’ll find chicken Sorrento ($16), which features eggplant and cappicola, listed next to chicken fingers ($10), the worst thing ever to happen to a poor hen.

The $15 veal parmigiana turns out to be a giant portion with suitably tender cutlets of breaded veal beneath a good sauce and a lot of mozzarella cheese. (For a dollar more, it’s available with a confluence of four cheeses.) Traditional items like veal and peppers ($12) and veal Sorrento ($15) also are available.

Seafood items include stuffed sole ($12), which revealed itself as a plump but somewhat dry roll of fish with a bready crabmeat filling and butter as a principal flavoring agent. There are a few shrimp dishes, a $10 fish-and-chips dinner, baked or fried scallops ($14) and fried clams ($10), among other items.

For the Atkins crowd, there are low-carb items scattered throughout the menu, identified as such in a back-page listing.

Then there’s pizza. We paid another visit, this time as takeout customers, to cash in one of the menu coupons: $2 off a 12-cut pie with an order of 20 chicken wings and a two-liter bottle of soda. We phoned it in, found parking alongside the restaurant, and watched, impressed, as the assembly line of teenage workers distributed an impressive stream of such orders to the parade of clientele.

No surprises with the wings, which were crisp and remained so because they weren’t drowning in sauce. A broccoli-sausage pizza ($13.50) was as expected, a mainstream preparation in a field crowded with better and worse.

There are house specialty pies, too, like the blue-cheese and chicken-wing pizza, which I’m eager to sample, the lasagna pizza, and even a breakfast pizza made with eggs, mozzarella, and your choice of breakfast meat (bacon is one of them).

In sum, Mama’s perseveres in a neighborhood that has changed fantastically over the years. Its pricing and service and decor identify it as a middle-of-the-road eatery and it fulfills this category nicely.

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