Once more, the name Mill Road finds its way into a restaurant review. Our regular readers will have spotted this recurring theme by now. Mill Road is a bizarre place – by day, a deceivingly quiet neighborhood road, but by night a cultural melting pot that those with a keen eye for gastronomy in Cambridge will almost certainly be quite familiar with. As the list of restaurants we’ve visited grows, we’ve come to find that this buzzing cosmopolitan spot is a crude litmus test for the quality and authenticity of food one can expect.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the subject of this review is no exception to the above. Standing on the sidewalk, one sees the bright and bold red lettering contrasted with the white window panes. The colors of the Italian flag hang just above the door, rounding off the entire restaurant front. We visited on a weekday evening and the place was decently full – not enough to make one have to shout across the table but just enough to make us feel at ease. The timeless interior decor and rustic table decorations, like the checkered red table cloths and the lit candle centerpiece, certainly helped too.

To put it in a nutshell, the food was good, really good! To start the meal, we ordered two pasta dishes: pesto with pine nuts and basil and Italian sausage with friarielli. While we were waiting for our dishes to come, the enthusiastic waitress brought us some olives on the house and even snapped a picture of us for the restaurant’s social media. Basking in our brief moment of fame, it wasn’t long until our handmade trofie pasta came. We were happy to see that thought had been put into the pasta type chosen since the many twists of trofie allow it to hold plenty of sauce. While eating, we couldn’t help but to listen to the conversation next to us between the owner and a customer about the sourcing and quality of ingredients brought into the restaurant. This only confirmed to us what we already knew: that restaurants where deliberate decisions regarding the inputs, be it food, decoration, wine, are as close as possible to the ownership are the best ones.

On the pasta, we found the pesto dish to be rich and vibrant, with the hearty coating allowing the herby tones of the pesto to shine through. The sausage dish was tasty and simple. The choice to declutter the dish by keeping the sausage as the main character and limiting additions to some greens for textural contrast was wise.

• Lord Orli
• Some prosciutto-based pizza (can’t seem to find on latest menu)

Next came the pizzas. The selection of ingredients on the pizza menu really stood out to us and accordingly we chose two that we thought looked quite special. From the appetizing appearance to the unmistakable crunch of cutting into the crust to the rich and delicious tomato base, these were some good, quality pizzas! The pizza dough perfectly balanced the savory blend of capers, ‘nduja and anchovy on the Orli and provided a nice ‘palate cleanser’ on the prosciutto pizza, where the tang of the tomato base was just a bit more apparent. We were really happy with our choices.

While finishing up the pizzas, we began eyeing the dessert menu and settled on the chocolate salame and, unsurprisingly, the tiramisu. We’re big fans of homemade items, since these give a chance for the chef’s personal tastes and playfulness to come out, so we were looking forward to seeing how these two desserts would taste. We were not disappointed to say the least! The chocolate salame’s filling had hints of salt which prevented the filling from overpowering the palate. The crunchy bite of the biscuit was felt right away and told us from the first spoonful that this was a freshly prepared salame. We love to see it! The tiramisu was soft, light and creamy with the ever so bitter taste of the coffee-soaked lady fingers balancing it all.

On this more informal occasion, we went with the house wine for the main meal and finished things off with a glass of the Passito Rosso, their only sweet wine.

Review by Matias Silva.