Decided to try Cuvino Restaurant tonight. Not far from our home. Got a Wine Award (2 wine glasses) in the recent print edition of WS.
Generally, restaurants with good wine lists have good food.
1) the food was quite good. We split some grilled octopus which was terrific. My wife had some sort of dish with eggplant, ground beef, etc., with a side of spinach. I had chicken parmesan, which typically is rather ordinary. This was excellent.
2) The wine list is extensive. They have about 25 different Baroli, about 25 different Brunelli. Pages and pages. Not super overpriced, either. I think the wine list is 100% Italian.
3) The prices for the food on the menu on the internet are misleading….The prices on the internet are HIGHER than the prices at the restaurant. For example, a steak on the internet is $35, but on the restaurant menu it is $31. The other thing is that the wine list online doesn’t list the prices of the wine.
4) They do a big carryout business--On Tuesdays, the wine is half price for carryout. And, you can also come into the place and buy a bottle (or more) of wine and leave…In other words, it is an Italian wine store.
5) In a strip shopping center. Looks like nothing from the outside. Not all that elegant in the inside either. Bar area is a bit noisy, but the back of the house is better.
6) We’ll be back there to try other stuff.
7) Corkage is $25, but with a few hundred reasonably priced bottles on the list, I would just order from their list. We had a 2016 Chianti Classico Reserva from Tomaiolo. That wine cost us $25 for the bottle. It retails for about $12, so the mark up is tolerable. A good solid, quite dry, 88 pointer, in my view.