Robin Garr's LOUISVILLE Restaurant Reviews

85	Ray Parrella's 2311 Frankfort Ave. (502) 899-5575

The other day, I got the idea of calling a few of my sophisticated friends to go down to Ray Parella's new quarters and have a few laughs making fun of the decor. This seems to be the chic and trendy thing to do, or so I hear.

But as it turns out, I guess I don't have any friends sophisticated enough for that kind of thing, and it appears that I'm not, either. A pleasant lunchtime visit to the new Crescent Hill location of this old Italian-American favorite revealed that there's nothing particularly funny about the style of the place ... and the food was just as good as I had hoped it would be.

This is not Vincenzo's, but it doesn't try to be. What it is, it does quite well: Old-fashioned Italian-American family fare, served up in a setting that's both cozy and appropriate. And a historic place it is, this small brick house. Most recently home to Sweet Surrender (which has moved to Bardstown Road), it's one of the city's oldest buildings, originally a toll house along the old Frankfort Pike back in the early 1800s, long before the railroad came through.

The dining room is actually two rooms of the old house connected through a broad arch. The underlying architecture is classically attractive, with very high ceilings and tall, narrow windows, although as you might expect in a very old houses with this configuration, it can be a bit drafty on a winter day.

The new owners have redecorated a bit, painting the walls pale gray and hanging a few Italian-theme tapestries and food-and-wine posters around. The notorious black curtains and a rather discreet garland of plastic ivy with tiny white lights aren't that startling to anyone who's dined in modest family Italian-American restaurants, and neither is the mantel top filled with wine bottles. It's really quite discreet by the standard of similar establishments of a generation ago ... the tables are topped with white butcher paper (and yes, crayons so the kids can draw on them), and there's not a red-checked tablecloth or candle-dripped Chianti basket-bottle in sight.

The lunch and dinner menus appear identical except for the prices, which one assumes reflect larger portions at dinner time. Both feature standard Italian-American fare, predominantly but not invariably made with dark, red and spicy long-simmered tomato sauce.

About 18 lunch entrees range from $5.25 (for spaghetti with tomato sauce) to $7 (for baked penne pasta with Italian sausage and green peppers). The same dishes are $6.25 to $9.25 at night. There's also a good selection of appetizers, soups and salads, plus submarine sandwiches, homemade desserts, and an extensive list of family-style dinners to go, sufficient to feed four to six hungry people at prices ranging from $25 (for spaghetti and tomato sauce with garlic bread on the side) to $31 (for penne with smoked chicken, cappellini con pollo orpenne with Italian sausage and green peppers.

The wine list is very short, with generic red, white and pink by the glass plus a half-dozen bottles, of which I would unhesitatingly choose the Gabbiano Chianti, a good, "benchmark" Tuscan red and a fine match with Parrella's fair, for $21. Imported and domestic bottled beers are also available.

Our lunch began with a wicker basket full of good garlic bread, simple but fresh, buttery and garlicky and served toasty hot (and plenty more where it came from if you ask).

The day was cold, so hot soup seemed like a warming opener for a hearty lunch. It came in surprisingly generous portions in glass "yard-sale" bowls (we ordered cups but were given bowls, and were charged the dinner price for a cup - $2.25 instead of $1.95. They didn't ask us about the upgrade, but it still seemed like a good deal).

Minestrone was flavorful, a reddish-brown, sweet tomato-based broth, a bit thin in texture but full of flavor, loaded with tomato chunks, good-size squares of pasta, garbanzo beans, green beans and white beans, a hearty old-country vegetable soup.

Chicken soup was just as good if a bit more refined, short strands of broken-up spaghetti swimming with tender bites of chicken and fine-chopped celery in a rich, golden and rather salty chicken broth.

Main courses are served on attractive if simple earthenware plates. Spaghetti with meatballs ($6.25) was properly al dente and plenty of it. The meatballs were straightforward, beefy and reasonably light, and the sauce was standard old-style Italian-American, long-cooked on the back burner until caramelized, reddish-brown and naturally sweet. A whiff of dried "Italian herb mix" could have been dealt with a lighter hand and suited us better, although I've had worse at fancier local Italian spots than Parrella's.

My lunch choice was stuffed shells ($5.25), a special of the day. Two large and properly cooked pasta shells were stuffed to bursting with creamy ricotta cheese and subtle spice and topped with another ration of what appeared to be the same tomato sauce that dressed the spaghetti. It was garnished with an attractive and healthy vegetable melange of zucchini and summer squash, cauliflower florets, roma and lima beans and ripple-cut carrots, all cooked until tender but not mushy and tossed with a little butter.

Homemade desserts are hard to pass by, and the Italian cannoli may be the best. A crisply fried tube of rich, sweet pastry tube was stuffed with a sweet and creamy cheese filling flavored with a whiff of anise liqueur (I recommend this authentic version in favor of the almond-flavored alternative laced with Amaretto). Attractively presented on a large plate sprinkled with miniature chocolate morsels, it was as good a cannoli as I've enjoyed in New York ... or Italy.

A filling lunch for two came to $21.73, plus a $4.27 tip for competent and friendly service. $$

(January 2003)