Ciao Vito

My Family took me to Ciao Vito for my birthday. The look of the place is nice dark and trendy, but the noise was a horrible roar, it's almost as deafeningly noisy as Fife. Please folks some acoustic dampening would be in order. Fortunately we were in the 22nd St. side away from the worst of the noise.

At first our server was pleasant, the Calimari was excellent, and the Beet salad was amazing, except it was a little spendy for the amount of salad.

I had the pork chop and my husband and daughter had the skirt steak. Both the meats were beautifully prepared, the chanterells with the Pork were heavenly, as was the broccoli raab with the steak. What I didn't understand was why with a 2.5 inch thick pork chop they would only give about 3 tablespoons of polenta, to go with it. The mashed potatos were similarly scare with maybe a quarter of a cup of potatos with the steak. Despite the anemic quantities of starch, everything was quite good.

We get the dessert menu, and for a chilly November evening, the only chocolate dessert they had was ice cream. The website has a menu with a choclate dessert I really wanted to try, but they didn't have it that night.

My husband had ice cream, my daughter had tiramisu, both were good.

I find having tiramisu late in the evening keeps me up, so I decided to have the apple crisp.

First, I ignored a red flag when the menu said the apple crisp was made of 3 kinds of heirloom apples and one of these "heirlooms" was developed in the 1970s, and isn't much of a cooking apple, the other 2 were true heirlooms, but only one of them was a great cooking apple, but in a properly made apple crisp it shouldn't be much of an issue.

The description sounded like I would get a proper apple crisp with the apples prepared like for a pie, with a crisp crumble topping, baked to where the apples are soft, and the topping is crunchy. What I got was a plate of roasted/steamed skin on apple chunks with steamed granola sprinkled on top, and a small bump of gelato in the middle. Ciao Vito's "apple crisp" is more like a topping for a cooked oatmeal and yogurt breakfast than a dessert for after a fine meal.

The server must have seen my confused and disappointed face when she set it in front of me, because she was impossible to get to stop at our table after that. She dropped off the check and finished the transaction with only the quickest runs by our table, and few words. Given that the place was thinning out, it was crystal clear that she simply did not want to help us anymore.

Some of the food is truly great, some of the food isn't worth the money, and the service is uneven, I'm not sure we will ever come back, because Ciao Vito seems like such a crap shoot.