Amid our current culture of slick hype, inflated buzz and paper-only promises, it's especially nice to stumble upon a restaurant with old-fashioned values and solidly good food. Plus $10 takeout dinner specials that seem too good to be true.
Trattoria Bel Paese is an unassuming little Clark Kent of a restaurant in Cranford. By day, it's a luncheonette; in the evening, a curtain is drawn around the deli counter and, voila, it becomes a restaurant. By no means is it a formal dining spot -- the tablecloths are vinyl, the walls are covered in kitschy bric-a-brac and the mismatched plates are chipped with use. But food lovers should certainly pay attention to what's going on behind the curtain.
Bel Paese is not a northern Italian restaurant, with all those attendant upscale yuppie connotations, nor is it a New Jersey red-sauce Italian-American restaurant. Rather, it is the kind of place you could have found years ago in New York's Little Italy, when the neighborhood was less of a tourist destination and occupied more real estate. You can still find these restaurants in the Italian neighborhoods of other big cities, such as Boston and Montreal -- friendly little spots that are easily missed by anyone but the locals and feature old-fashioned recipes for stuffed artichokes, pasta fagioli, bucatini or zuppa di pesce. These are the kinds of authentic restaurants where Italian soccer fans go, where people still speak the mother tongue (both in the kitchen and in the dining room), where both food and family matter.Vegetables also matter at Bel Paese, and meals here are accompanied generously with the kind of sides that you can picture at tables all over Sicily: sauteed fava beans, artichokes, zucchini, hot peppers, red peppers, broccoli rape, eggplant.
Whole wheat fusilli ($15), accompanied by fava beans, artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes and pecorino cheese, was cooked perfectly and was surprisingly delicate. It's a favorite of our vegetarian waitress, and we could easily see why. Stuffed red pepper ($9), an evening special, featured a lush, charred fresh red pepper filled with rice and ground beef and topped with melted mozzarella and tomato sauce. (The tomato sauce was sweet and amazing; don't miss it.)
Grilled veal chop ($25), another evening special, was a Fred Flintstone-sized piece of meat, gloriously charred and served with broccoli rabe sauteed perfectly with garlic. Salmon oreganato was a nice version of this old-fashioned and once-ubiquitous preparation; here, the meaty, sweet salmon was not overwhelmed by too much breading (or oregano, for that matter). This was simply good, in a '50s kind of way, and you remember why a nicely-done oreganato was once so popular. This came with spaghetti, which was perfectly prepared with oil and garlic.
Desserts ($8) are all outsourced, which is more than disappointing; we have the feeling this kitchen could produce a few truly special sweets. The tiramisu is good, if standard; the ricotta cheesecake was still a bit frozen; creme brulee was too sweet and custardy, although lemon gelato was refreshing.
Bel Paese offers amazing $10 dinner takeout specials. They come with entree, salad, soda and two side dishes. Order $5 items from the kids menu, which includes lightly breaded and delicious homemade chicken fingers.
It's an old-fashioned approach to running a restaurant, and, these days, it's surely welcome.
Trattoria Bel Paese
104 N. Union Ave., Cranford
(908) 276-3005, trattoriabelpaese.com
Hours: Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Dinner: 5-9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday: 5-9 p.m.