Photo by: Shannon DeCelle

Trojan Trophy
By B.A. Nilsson

Lo Porto Ristorante Caffe
85 4th St., Troy, 273-8546. Serving dinner Tue-Sat 5-10 (July-Aug: Thu-Sat 5-10). AE, D, MC, V.
Cuisine: classic northern Italian
Entrée price range: $10 (Pasta with marinara) to $33 (filet mignon and lobster tail)
Ambiance: cozy
Clientele: upscale loyalists

Once upon a time, when Troy was poised to become the area’s dining mecca, Lo Porto Ristorante would have been one of the top destinations. With Italian cuisine a well-entrenched commodity, chef Michael Lo Porto provided his own interpretations of classic dishes, featuring a lot of northern fare, and became an instant favorite.

His secrets were simple: fresh ingredients, which unfortunately exact a higher price, and a skilled hand at sauces. Lo Porto is actually of Sicilian descent, and learned cooking from his family, a family that ran a restaurant there for several generations. The influence of French cooking upon Sicily explains part of this skill; Lo Porto’s own love of food and family accounts for the rest.

And so he opened in Troy in 1991, in a cramped 50-seat space that came to life as crowds jammed it for enjoyable dinners. With time and success came expansion, both to the restaurant—a room was added to double the capacity—and into another, when Lo Porto took over the Sign of the Tree at the Empire State Plaza five years later. He still spends much of his time there, and has placed his nephew, Carmelo Lo Porto, as executive chef in Troy.

There’s no diminution of food quality. During a couple of recent visits, I was delighted to learn just how excellent the food remains, listed on pretty much the same menu as has always been in place. It’s just been repriced to keep up with the times.

Where the two visits contrasted was in service, which later was acknowledged as a problem at times. Evidently it was busier than expected on my Thursday visit, and the staff had to struggle to stay above water. We were seated in the back room, a boxy, unattractive space that acted as a megaphone for a rambunctious six-top at the room’s rear; after 10 minutes of neglect, we were able to get enough server attention to get us moved to a table near the bar, which was gloriously quiet in comparison. After that, dinner proceeded slowly but consistently.

On a Friday visit, I was overjoyed to discover that Maurilio Gregori is the weekend host. Onetime chef-owner of the Quackenbush house, he knows his way around fine dining and the customers for same, and helped make the experience very pleasant.

My current dining strategy (besides eating less of what’s served) is to order items different from my usual choices, I thought, and so chose mussels casino ($8). Later, I discovered I’d ordered the same appetizer during my 1992 review visit. I noted that I was served “a small plate of the mollusks, opened and cleaned, topped with breading and bacon and baked until the juices flow into the topping and make it all moist and crunchy. And tangy with an appropriate combination of herbs.” And that’s how they are today.

Seafood figures into most of the appetizers. Oysters Rockefeller ($10) gets a slightly different spin with mozzarella and Romano cheeses atop the spinach; fried calamari ($12) offers no surprises but it offers no disappointment: hot, crunchy, tender—even those little leggy bits are tender—with both cocktail sauce and a hot marinara for dipping.

A black bean and sausage soup ($5) leaned toward the salt for its finish, but the combination of ingredients was nicely proportioned.

Salads precede the entrées, so you may wish to moderate your appetizer intake. On the other hand, we emerged with so much in the way of leftovers that several subsequent meals were thus derived.

Plain old spaghetti (or linguine, or ziti) is available with a variety of the usual toppings—meatballs, sausage, mushrooms, clam sauce and such—for $10-$11, and baked pastas such as lasagna and eggplant parmigiana are $13.

Veal dishes dominate one menu column. Scallopine and cutlet variants, even a dish named for Martin Scorcese, who fell in love with this restaurant while he was in town filming The Age of Innocence some years ago. I forgot to ask for whom Veal Giuseppe ($17) is named, but he was a lover of rich food: The rolled veal is stuffed with crabmeat and provolone cheese, wrapped in prosciutto and covered in a roasted red pepper cream sauce that would make a great pasta companion. But the plate, like most entrées, comes with potatoes and vegetables, and there’s a side dish of marinara-sauced pasta!

As a representative chicken dish, my wife enjoyed the chicken sauté sec ($16), adding oranges and raisins to a super-rich cream sauce that she only grudgingly shared and also hoarded in its leftover state.

On my Friday visit I was accompanied by an Atkins dieter, who expressed some anticipatory terror about Italian cuisine. He pounced on the rack of lamb ($23), which was as fine a preparation as I’ve tasted, combining a rich marinade with the kind of seasoning that springs to flavorful life under the grill. Having confessed his diet to our server, Brian had extra vegetables replace the potatoes. (And I scarfed his side of pasta for a later lunch.)

Mugnaia are seafood dishes with pasta, taking there name from a word that means “miller’s wife.” Priced from $15 to $19 and featuring scallops, sole, trout, red snapper or a seafood combo, they’re huge portions that sport a creamy sauce flavored with such Mediterranean mainstays as capers and olives, with a sprinkling of basil. The scallops version, as expected, boasted plump, juicy seafood.

When the city installed the mediocre Fresno’s chain into the former Castaway’s space instead of welcoming a locally owned business, it verified its lack of vision. Chez Sophie Bistro was going to move to Troy. The Capehouse once reigned as seafood house supreme. The Allegro Café is gone. Thank goodness the River Street Café and Lo Porto persevere as Troy’s fine-dining venues.

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