Food&Music at Ferraro’s Has Patrons Shouting “Bravissimo!” – Part 2

Ferraro's Italian Restaurant & Wine Bar

Of all the items I gorged myself with, at Ferraro’s Italian Restaurant & Wine Bar, on Wednesday night (and I think we ate an eight or nine course meal over roughly 3 hours, give or take…), I’m only going to discuss a few, so that you aren’t here all day – but suffice it to say that I was a very happy, if not overly sated, camper after eating dinner, that night. 

Pizzetta Parma

The Pizzetta Parma was very tasty.  Fired in a wood-oven, it consisted of a thin, crispy crust, covered with mozzarella, arugula, prosciutto, shaved parmigiano, and was drizzled in truffle oil.  Good?  Quite.  Frankly, I’ve become so enamored of truffle oil, I’ve got half a mind to start carrying some with me in a flask, so I can whip it out at restaurants and put some color in my world.  (By the way, if you’re reading this, Sirio Maccioni – I place the blame for this squarely on your shoulders.  Just thought you’d wanna know.)

Burrata, Prosciuitto, Rucola

Next came the Burata, Prosciutto, Rucola, which the menu describes as “Fresh Mozzarella with a Creamy Center Wrapped with Parma Prosciutto over Arugula Salad” – but I just describe as brilliant.  Besides being among the most beautifully presentations of buratta I’ve ever seen put in front of me, it was so fresh that I could almost hear the water buffalo who had lent her milk, somewhere in Italy, bleating as I bit into it.  Yum!

Bucatini Amatriciana

And then there was the pasta…  A long, hollow noodle, Mimmo Ferraro’s Bucatini Amatriciana is paired with a fresh tomato-based sauce (kind of similar to a pomodoro).  This would’ve been great right there, but Mimmo goes and cranks things up by adding Quanciale (pork cheek), big slaps of onions, red-wine vinegar, Parmigiano Regiano, and flakes of red pepper.  The result is one of the best noodle dishes I’ve ever had in Las Vegas.  If you shun things that are flavorful, opting instead for those that are bland and flavorless – this is not the pasta for you.  Move on. 

Carpaccio di Tonno

I could carry-on some more about how wonderful the Carpaccio di Tonno was, the herb-encrusted Ahi sliced paper-thin, and topped with a wonderful mixture of diced tomatoes, olives, capers, red onions and fennel.  I could tell you about the succulent Risotto Salsiccia e Vino Rosso, firm on the fork, but tender in the mouth, with its homemade spicy sausage, short-grain rice, and Barolo wine, ever so delicately congealed with the aid of Mascarpone.  Hell, I could do a lot of things, but at some point I have to assume that you’ve got the point.

DJ Shoe is your mood-music maestro at Food&Music on Wednesdays at Ferraro's Italian Restaurant & Wine Bar

A final note about this new weekly party…  As much as it’s about the food at Ferraro’s, DJ Shoe is to be commended for his musical puppetry.  It is harder than one might think to make sure that the music is complementary to the evening, without taking-over.  Subtly mixing “The Theme from The Godfather” with sultry samba music by way of Brazil, Shoe presented a musical accompaniment that was the musical cherry on top of the whole affair.  My favorite point in the evening’s soundtrack came around midnight when I looked-up from my plate (I was vacillating between the Risotto and Bucatini at this point), and while trying to slurp-up a noodle, realized I was hearing the inimitable Claudine Longet sing “Fly Me to the Moon” in the wispy way only she could. 

Apparently when the pendulum swings, it swings far; because at that point it had veered so far into Heteroland that it flew all the way around and landed smack-dab in the middle of Homoville.  I guess that, being the only inhabitant of the latter, I was the only one who noticed.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that…