Audio By Carbonatix
Venezia is a slice of institutional cafeteria ambiance done up in Italian red and green, with a heavy emphasis on the green. It has a counter up front and a dining room with tables covered in green and white checked tablecloths. An awning hangs over the semi-open kitchen with Christmas lights strung along the rim. Bottles of pickled peppers and carrots and things that look like pork viscera (but are probably fettuccine) are placed along a counter surface.
This is a roadside hutch, a strip-mall booth, a corral of such ordinariness that it’s in danger of slipping into suburban catalepsy and morphing into a Schlotsky’s or a doughnut shop.
Venezia is also a sleeper of sorts. Sure, it sells quasi-Italian prefabrications like crispy fried cheese with marinara sauce and fried mushrooms. But it also serves delicious house-made bread with a sturdy but pliable crust and a steaming, yeasty core. Shrimp scampi was a pedestrian mingling of four shrimp on a plate in a puddle of butter sauce infused with tomato and lustily pocked with fearlessly hefty chunks of garlic. Those shrimp held up well, sweating as they were with juice and flavor.
What’s really striking, though, about this downscale cafe is that it’s one of the few places around Dallas that knows how to beat veal senseless. The juicy, lightly floured veal piccata is pounded butter-knife thin and propped on a twisted nest of caper-studded pasta oozing with pan-dripping butter sauce well sassed with lemon. This piccata is as smooth as it is deliciously tidy.
Rigatoni arrabiata stumbled a bit. While the spicy marinara was delicious and tangy, with a pronounced layer of sweetness, the pasta tubes were flaccid and overcooked.
But pizzas recaptured surprise. White pizza, a thin-crust pie, was layered simply with roasted garlic, ricotta cheese and mozzarella. It was delicately chewy and slightly sweet, almost like a blintze.
Meat-lover’s pizza, an orgy of pepperoni, hamburger, Canadian bacon and Italian sausage, was braced on a crisp chewy crust. But it suffered from a dearth of sauce, a substance that could have pulled the disparate meat parts of this pie together a little better and helped ease them down the hatch. Despite the occasional small misstep, Venezia is solid. Solid and cheap. And that’s good, especially if you like green.
