Uphill Battle

Yes, it's crowded — but Bocelli has yet to become a dining destination.

by Elisa Ludwig

Michael T. Regan BREAST IN SHOW: Bocelli's chicken Marsala entrée is a winning take on the Italian-American favorite. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

While the city proper continues to spawn Italian BYOs with the frequency fertile A-list starlets pop out babies, there are, believe it or not, some Philly neighborhoods where a Bolognese is a rare commodity. For some time, Chestnut Hill was one of these neighborhoods, having seen the last of its olive oil reserves dribble away with the closings of Pollo Rosso and Stella Notte, dooming the local residents to a diet of sushi, salads and Schmitters. Now, finally, with the opening of a satellite location of Gwynedd Valley's Bocelli, they can have their meat gravy, too.

The original Bocelli is well reputed, and the opening of this one was met with much excitement. So much that, after just a couple of months, it's hard to get a table at this BYO at the uppermost stretch of Germantown Avenue. The tasteful if bland taupe interior (a redo since taking over from previous tenant Al Dana) is stuffed to the wainscotting with collar-popped doyennes of the Hill toting Burberry bags, bottles of Chardonnay and the occasional martini shaker.

But truthfully, other than the agreeably safe Sunday-dinner menu of Italian classics (aging mothers and school-aged children alike can agree on chicken parm), there is little as yet to recommend Bocelli as a dining destination.

The mostly young service is hit-or-miss. You can start with a confident and extremely adept server reading your specials and taking orders with ease and end with a much cockier one neglecting to take your dessert order, then blaming the lapse on you because you didn't "get him." You may or may not have to wait for bread, or you might get your check before you're finished.

All of this would be forgivable were the food better than just average. And with a by-the-book straightforward menu like this one, the bar should be reasonably attainable. Mostly, though, the cooking is just not careful. The antipasto plate is a series of helpless vegetables cooked into mushy compliance: crumpling slices of grilled eggplant and melted squash and limp blades of roasted pepper, all swimming in more olive oil than your bread can soak up. The only things not half-dissolved are vaguely sweet carrots, a handful of olives and undercooked potato wedges. Meanwhile, perfectly good mushroom caps are crammed with a gummy filling of crabmeat, lumps of sausage, spinach and roasted pepper.

The simpler ideas are usually executed more successfully here. A salad special of roasted peppers, buffalo mozzarella and arugula is delicately lemony. A beef carpaccio, glistening with oil and lemon juice and embellished with papery sheets of shaved parmesan, is also a good bet.

It would be nice if pastas came in half-size portions for first courses, but that option is not available. Though the filling in the crabmeat ravioli is pulverized beyond recognition, the pasta is firm and its tomato cream sauce, fringed with sun-dried tomato, is subtle in all the right ways. Tagliatelle, which sounds delicate and homemade, is actually something closer to dried fettuccini; the advertised shrimp amounts to a handful of the bean-size crustaceans that usually adorn fried rice and three tail-on bonus shrimp that would still fit into the "small" category. This is especially unfortunate because the creamy pesto sauce is pleasantly verdant and nutty.

Sometimes, the food here is plain frustrating. The lasagna should be a show-stopper, the paper-thin handmade pasta layered multiple times with cream-inflected meat sauce, but instead it's smothered with a cloying tomato sauce that weighs the whole thing down, overpowering the flavors and wasting all the painstaking kitchen labor put into it.

Chicken cacciatore, skinless breast sautéed with mushrooms, peppers and still-crunchy onions, swims in tomato sauce so watery it barely makes a stain on the accompanying spaghetti.

A veal shank osso bucco special is more memorable, the two shanks tender-braised, soulfully seasoned and served with snappy haricots vert, though the saffron "risotto" beneath is merely saffron-flavored short-grain rice unmolded into a dome. The chicken Marsala is one of the better ones I've met, the pounded-thin breast still juicy and succulent and the mushroom-studded sauce richly musky (though light on actual Marsala flavor). The potatoes, on the other hand, are stiff and dense, their skins suspended like shreds of paper in the gooey mass.

As much as this neighborhood needs this restaurant, the place needs to step up its game. A few homemade desserts would be preferable to the laundry list of pre-fab sweets: Bindi sorbets in shells, lacquered layer cakes, tiramisu and a milk chocolate soufflé cake overbaked to the point of evaporating its liquid center. There is, however, a decent cannoli with a flaky shell and a cinnamon-spiked ricotta filling. It's not the best, but for right now it's probably one of few — if not the only one — around here. And that, of course, gives it a distinct advantage.

(e_ludwig@citypaper.net)

Bocelli

8630 Germantown Ave., 215-248-1980, bocellidining.com

Hours: Tue.-Thu., 5-9:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5-10:30 p.m.; Sun., 5-9:30 p.m.

Appetizers, $6.95-$10.95; Entrées, $13.50-$17.95

BYOB

Cash only (for now)

Reservations recommended

Takeout available