Alio Olio sets out to make simple Italian food, but simplicity isn’t always easy. You’ll find yourself in a wood-heavy dining room with a fireplace and bar styled after an old taverna. There’s a sincere wish to ‘be of a high European standard’ says Giuseppe Gladiatore, the Milanese owner who has worked in restaurants in Singapore and at Beijing’s Annie’s.
The low prices may impress the thrifty, but the reality is that quality ingredients are expensive and it is difficult to deliver the magical flavours of Italy without them. Pizza begins with a doughy crust that tastes of little (26-76RMB in two sizes). Bland salads are diluted with watery iceberg. Speckle in a few show-off strips of radicchio and it pretends to be a tricolore. There are variations: squirt mayonnaise and sprinkle bacon bits and call it Caesar (15/25RMB). A Greek (16/26RMB) salad comes with a dice of bastard feta that tastes like cream cheese, along with rubbery sliced olives.
On the positive, a bowl of tomato soup (25RMB) is an artful use of tinned tomatoes and dairy. But an appetiser of grilled eggplant with ricotta, walnut and more of that haunting balsamic dressing is strangely stacked with pretzel sticks (28RMB) – yes, you read that right. Remove the childish Jenga presentation and there’s hope for this dish, with good creamy ricotta and soft eggplant slices.
The pastas hold promise, cooked with prowess. If only the sauces could rise up to meet the challenge. The restaurant’s bolognese (28/38RMB) is a ground meat sauce, robbed of the carrot, celery vegetal roundness that normally makes it sing. It’s a minor infraction in this list of offences, especially when compared against a tousle of spaghetti crowned by meatballs (58RMB). The first bite is almost jaw snapping, with a bounce that leaves the bewildering question of how it is possible to create such firm texture in minced meat.
The tagliata di manzo (48RMB) comes as a pounded paillard of beef fillet with thick slices of soft garlic, a pile of undressed arugula and more balsamic gunk. It’s a misinterpreted version of what should be a lovely seared sliced steak over arugula leaves naturally dressed with jus.
You can choke it down with a glass of house red. For the 20RMB it costs, it’s better left for making vinegar. A nice finish comes with a wedge of creamy cheesecake (18RMB) that’s more New York than Milan.
Alio Olio takes a stab at upscale swank with a piano and live music. Service is less practised and more clueless. But, with low prices all round and a value lunch deal starting at 38RMB, this new opening is likely to find a value-conscious clientele as it establishes itself. Lillian Chou