JS
Jeff Spitulnik
Dec 6, 2025
Lovely, cozy establishment in a convenient location with very friendly, knowledgeable staff. We enjoyed our time here, even if the food was lackluster. The menu is reminiscent of our trips to northern Italy, even Tyrolean in some sense, like the mushroom risotto (which makes sense given the restaurant’s name). The menu really is fantastic, which is what drew us in. The fact that there is a specials menu is typically a good sign there will be fresh, creative, thoughtful dishes. Sadly, the quality of the food didn’t match up to our expectations given the prices and obvious homage to amazing, traditional Italian cuisine. I’ll take some of the blame: I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the uninteresting Californian variety of porcini (even though it’s so fresh here) after eating so many wild fresh porcini dishes across Italia’s mountainous areas. But that aside, the rice in the risotto was overdone (and not actually any of the varieties of rice I’ve ever seen in risotto before), it was way too cheesy (almost like a pizza!), and the flavors were notable only for how shockingly bland and uninspired they were. (I wanted to ask the bartender for a zest of lemon to season the risotto a bit.) A pasta dish we had wasn’t much more flavorful or inspired, although the pasta itself was decent quality — fresh and tender, perhaps handmade in house. For dessert, we had a scoop of what was pitched as gelato, but it clearly was not. It was neither high enough fat content nor dense enough to be considered gelato, and the flavor again, barely registering. Nice place, regardless. You should go and try it yourself, and maybe you’ll have a better time with the food than we did.