Rossano's Restaurant
167 Sukhumvit 21 Road (In soi 19 or Asoke soi 3)
Bangkok 10110
Tel. 02 260 1861
Website

L'Opera has a wonderful reputation among Italians as a home from home, not just because it serves great food but because it was one of the first quality Italian restaurants to open in this town.
Original owner Gennari Rossano sold up and went into retirement. Then, as so often happens to those who have had such a full life working the 100 hours a week that is required to successfully operate a good restaurant, he got bored.
So welcome to Rossano's, a purpose-built Italian restaurant on Asoke Soi 3 (the very end of Sukhumvit 19). The building is set well back from the road with a car park in front and the bespoke nature of the building is advertised by the leaded bay windows and the imposing front door: guarded by an impressive pig decked out with a chef's hat, holding a ham and a decent-sized knife.
Through this door is a small but adequate bar area ideal to meet friends for a quick aperitif. I had arranged to lunch with an august member of Bangkok’s culinary circle and was a few minutes early. I was briefly greeted by Rossano before sitting at the bar and summoning a wine list.
In recent years I have travelled to the Langhe (about 100 kilometres south of Turin) where the wonderful rolling vineyards of Piedmont are situated. In the wine town of Barberesco I was introduced to Roero Arneis, a local wine made with the Arneis grape. Roero is the DOCG. Go to any wine bar or restaurant in the Alba area and Arneis will be one of the house wines: everybody drinks it. I have heard two reasons why you seldom see this wine outside Italy: the locals drink it all and that it does not travel. Well, the bottle I had at Rossano’s had survived the journey, so the locals must be drinking it all!
For a red, I once again looked to Piedmont and my eye fell on La Spinetta Pin. La Spinetta nudged a memory cog from my Barberesco trips. I was told by the helpful manager that it was Cabernet Sauvignon, which upon reflection is unlikely in the land of Nebbiolo and Barbera. It was a very good choice and by stint of a few minutes on the net I found out my memory jog was not wrong. The winery near Neive is in the Babareresco DOC. The website, www.la-spinetta.com, will provide those interested with a lot more information. And yes, the grape blend was 65% Nebbiolo and 35% Barbera.
With the all-important task of wine selection over, it was time to get down to the menus. We moved through to the restaurant, which has been carefully thought out to provide separate areas, with typical red-arched windows, vaulted doorways and low and high ceilings. Nicely understated decorations with crisp white table cloths and gleaming glassware completed the ambience. I could have been in Tuscany and the decor would have been about the same.
We did briefly look at the lunch menu, which at 320 baht for two courses and 390 for three courses looked very good value with loads of choice. However, we were there to review the place and thought we should be a more adventurous. As ever, I studied the specials menu first: there were 12 items on the printed menu, so I suspect that menu lasts for a month or so, and then, on the main menu, there was the full monte of appetisers, soups, salads, home-made pasta, dishes from the volcanic stone grill, meat main courses, fish and seafood, and finally the inevitable pizza. It sounds a lot larger than it was: none of the sections was over done and you would have to be a very picky eater not to find something you wanted.
I made a pick from the first section of the main menu entitled, in an all-encompassing way, Italian cold cuts and others. The unpronounceable Italian name of sfogliatalla (al prosciutto e funghi) caught my eye. Sfogliatalla seems to interpret into puff pastry. So puff pastry with ham and mushrooms is what I thought I had ordered and indeed exactly what I received. Light, freshly cooked flaky pastry was the base with decent mushrooms in the middle and prosciutto on top: a pleasant, comparatively simple appetiser.
For mains, I went to the specials menu, where I spotted ‘braised oxtail terrine in its own sauce, celery puree and cornflower polenta’. I was not sure what this would be like: it is common practice these days to use such unlikely terms when describing recipes. To me terrine, which is the French word for what we Brits call pate, is akin to a cold pie-style dish. In fact, this was a stew-like dish piled up in two layers with a slab of polenta between them. As one would expect with oxtail, it was a flavoursome offering and it went well with the polenta. The celery puree was pretty tasteless because it was local celery. The baby carrots, spinach and broccoli were fine.
My dining companion started with capriccio of beef, which looked high-quality. His comments were that it was very good and that they used decent olive oil. As a main, he had cotolette de Milanese, breaded veal chop to the uninitiated. As anybody who dines out regularly will tell you, this is a dish that is often totally screwed up, with the chop being pounded to a thinness that ensures it is overcooked and lacks flavour, simply because all the moisture has been beaten out of it. However, cooked properly so the meat is thinned but retains both thickness and consistency, this is a delicious dish. This submission was the latter.
Up until they cleared the plates from the main courses, which was at about 2.15pm, everything had gone swimmingly. Now it started going downhill as the service declined. We had to grab a reluctant waitress to get us dessert menus and then seek another to order. The farang management disappeared into the woodwork. In fact, because of the service, or lack of it, it took until after 3pm to get dessert for my guest, a very ordinary cheese plate for myself and finally two espressos. No suggestion was made that we may require a digestive, although once we offered to pay the bill, a complimentary Grappa was served to each of us.
It is a great location and the food is of a high standard. I did have a meal here one evening a few moons back and I was not that impressed: so unimpressed I did not think it good enough for a write up but after this visit I have revised my opinion upwards. Except for the loss of service and being told a wine, as good as it turned out, was Cabernet Sauvignon when it was Nebbiolo, it was difficult to fault.

This article was first published in Sukhumvit Eye