A three-foot high bottle of Merlot is one the first things you see when you step into Capri, an Italian restaurant in Lynnwood.
The rest of the place, with its pleasant, almost Disneyland-style cheesiness, seems to follow suit: neon purple grape-lights on a fake vine, fake roses on the table, fake columns on the walls.
The atmosphere was fun, but it made me nervous about the food on my recent visit. It brought back memories of pasta in bad cream sauce at similar establishments.
I shouldn’t have worried. The food was outstanding.
We started with an order of the bruscetta ($6.95), toasted bread topped with fresh diced tomatoes. The tomatoes were piled perilously high and were saltily delicious.
The server also brought bread with a fantastic dipping sauce — laden with herbs and red peppers. It was so good we asked to wrap up the last bit in a tiny plastic container at the end of the meal to take home.
We then moved on to a tasty Caesar salad split between the two of us ($7.50).
But the pollo Gorgonzola ($16.95) took the cake. Let me start by saying it was worth the $2 extra charge to split this dish, which had that deadly combination of extreme richness and I-don’t-want-to-stop-eating addictiveness. It was delicious.
The chicken breast was sauteed in butter and garlic and covered with a creamy Gorgonzola cheese sauce, with angel hair pasta and zucchini on the side. It had the creamy richness the ingredients suggest, with the mild tang of Gorgonzola cheese.
There was enough sauce to cover the chicken and pasta, with more left over to dip the zucchini and bread in — which we did. By the end, the plates were wiped clean.
The restaurant also serves pizza ($9.95), soups ($7.95 to $8.50), pastas ($12.95 to $13.95), lasagna ($14.95) and other seafood and chicken dishes in the $15 range.
Most of it is standard Italian restaurant fare, with some interesting combinations. The Spaghetti Puttanesca, for example, comes with garlic, olives, capers, anchovies and hot red pepper in marinara sauce.
Dining Out is a weekly column profiling a local restaurant selected by a staff writer. Writers accept no invitations, but readers’ suggestions are always welcome. Writers arrive unannounced, and The Enterprise pays their tabs.
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