Dive Into The Black Sea: La Dolce Vita Launches New Summer Menu

After taking a bite of La Dolce Vita's latest spring dishes, the restaurant proves itself as a worthy nomination on our where to go to eat with friends list. Below we have the scoop on their summer menu, which launches today (Jul 1) and combines a number of impressive dishes with inspiration from both Sardinian and Sicilian cuisines.

The revamped summer menu includes six salads with quirky names such as shrimp in jail, farm fritters, and the Summer Palace as well as five pastas with equally playful names, such as the bay of Naples, the Black Sea, and saffron magic.

Among the six main courses, they the choice between rib eye steak, beef tenderloin, lamb, codfish, shrimp, and tuna, and you get the feeling that Chef and Manager Fabio Falanga really went to town coming up with the names, which include the fat boy, tuna in crust, even a “?." Popular desserts remain on the menu, such as babba, tiramisu, and cheesecake.

Our summer tasting included smaller portions than you would normally receive, to ensure more was tasted and reviewed.

The salad, the farm fritters (RMB 65), was a trio of arancini (pork, chicken, and beef) with eggplant and tomato sauce. All three had plenty of flavor, but personally I preferred the chicken the most, which was well seasoned and tender. We also tried the roasted octopus with potato and leek cream, tomato, celery, and mullet bottarga. Unlike the lemon-flavored octopus in La Dolce Vita's spring menu, this roasted version was much smokier but just soft as before.

And of course there was no way we were going to skip the pastas; the Black Sea (RMB 95) was our favorite course of the entire meal and was made up of fregola served with ink squid sauce and sweet paprika. Fregola is a Sardinian pasta which is in many ways similar to couscous, and soaking up the ink squid sauce it took the veneer of black pearls plucked straight from the depths. The sweet and spicy elements of the paprika balanced well with the dish's umami finish. Another pasta, the Sunday Call, featured tajarin pasta, a type of ribbon pasta made of egg dough, with slow-cooked Australian beef ragout. You could taste the effort that was put into the sauce during its slow-cooking.

As for the main dishes, we tried the tuna in a breadcrumb crust: red tuna wrapped in mint-flavored bread crust served with fennel cream and caviar, which came a smooth second in my list of favorite dishes from the meal. The tuna was fresh and the sauce was creamy, made all the richer from the accompanying pine seeds. 

To finish, we had rum-flavored babba (RMB 58), a small Italian cake soaked in the good stuff, and dolloped with vanilla cream, ground pistachios, and strawberries. The dessert oozed with rum with each scoop and was a sure improvement on a of great sweet they already did well.

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Email: tracywang@thebeijinger.com
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Photos: Tracy Wang