Obecian Italian American

I didn’t recognize Espresso Cucina after a few years living away from OB, so when we walked in the tactfully decorated dining room I thought maybe a new restaurant had opened. It took a little jogging of our memory to recall it used to be Espresso Pizza. I guess it’s the same pizza with an interior redesign and new Italian menu.

And by new menu, I mean exactly the menu you’d expect from any Italian joint in America: chickens picatta and parmigiana, linguini with clams, and pastas with sauces including pesto, Bolognese and Alfredo. Or, if you want to go baked, a slice of lasagna or eggplant Siciliana.

We had fond memories of the pizza here, so decided to try out the new items brought in by the same change in ownership that brought the remodel and name change. My friends went with the spinach ravioli in porcini cream sauce and chicken parm. I was lured by the peas and pancetta of the house carbonara. Each cost between 13 and 15 dollars.

We started with a roasted artichoke appetizer, an 8 dollar dish that turned out to be a pile of artichoke hearts covered in garlic and melted cheese. It tasted all right, but lacked much effort — it’s presentation certainly didn’t match the décor, which pairs the rigid symmetry of bricks with a verdant living wall.

The hot, sticky knots of garlic bread helped balance the gooey cheese of the artichoke dish, and before long our entrées arrived. The carbonara, generously topped with diced pancetta, featured a creamy parmesan sauce and no egg, as far as I could tell. But the first thing that attracted my eye were the perfectly round green peas mixed in with the pork.

This dish also tasted all right, again maybe a little lackluster. The same can be said for the very creamy mushroom sauce of the spinach ravioli, with slightly better results from the chicken parm. These recipes don’t speak to the trends of curatorial ingredients usually expected in such a modern-looking restaurant. You could tag it comfort food — or unsophisticated, depending on your mood — then shrug and finish it with a tiramisu.

The Espresso pizza served at this address proved good enough for laid back OB for about 40 years. It’s still the best thing on the menu at the rechristened Cucina, which aptly captures the lethargy of the neighborhood with reliably mid-brow Italian food that would probably have seemed right on point with the restaurant’s old décor.