Luce Is the 4th-Best New Restaurant in America 2012
The best restaurant food transports you. It could be a lobster roll that sets you on the coast of Maine, or a plate of mac 'n' cheese that drops you back at your childhood dinner table. In the case of Luce (pronounced LOO-chay), dish after rustic dish transported me to a restaurant in Siena, Italy, where I was a college kid and first understood what real Italian food was all about. Inside the simple all-white storefront, shelves are lined with dried pasta, olive oil, and carefully curated housewares; 22 seats fill out the space. Is it a market? A restaurant? An installation by a local artist? In a way, it's all three. Luce, as it turns out, is the second restaurant from chef John Taboada and his wife, Giovanna Parolari, who own longtime Portland favorite Navarre. If Navarre's Italian food is simple, Luce's is bare-bones, almost monastic in its affinity for stripping dishes down to their essential ingredients. This is Italian home cooking to its core. Just look at the 20 or so antipasti available: farro pie, roasted beets and carrots, arancine, chicken liver crostini, meatballs—each plate only $2. At first glance, the spaghettini with garlic and hot peppers might look like what you made for your teenager as you were running out the door. But after the first bite—silky, with an alluring kick of heat—you'll find out you were so wrong. And so it continues: braised chicken with capers, grilled hanger steak simply bathed in rosemary and garlic oils, baked stuffed trout. Here, as in Italy, less is truly more.
