Cortese: The Follow Up...

After having a pleasurable experience with Cortese pizza I decided to go back for a proper dinner. I am going to make this brief because I don’t really have anything good to say about the food. The first problem is the menu…. It is WAY too long!!! Cortese has over 150 menu items… Not only is it difficult to choose what to order but I am sure it is difficult for management to keep all those ingredients fresh… I ordered the veal saltimbocca which is made with butter garlic, prosciutto, and mozzarella in a sherry cream sauce. I have had this dish at other Italian restaurants and always enjoyed it. Here, not so much… It came with a choice of side and a salad. The salad was made from typical ice-crutch lettuce and canned olives. I chose a baked potato as my side, which was fine. Although, It’s pretty hard to screw up a baked potato. The veal was served on its own plate quarantined from any other food on the table, it seemed to be drowning in a shallow puddle of sauce that the waitress (or kitchen) managed to spill over the edges of the dish on 3 sides. The veal was somewhat edible but there was an excess of sherry in the sauce and a lack of cream. It was incredibly sweet and not savory or rich at all. The presentation of the food was astonishingly bad and the waitress was overly enthusiastic. For $20 I was expecting more… Cortese is a nice place to sit and have a drink at the bar, watch sports and have a witty conversation with the bartender. But as for the food, I think I’ll stick to the pizza. 2 out of 5 stars…

Cortese Pizza

So after reading Bangchef’s comment, I had to see what Cortese’s was all about. First let me tell you about the atmosphere… If Tony Soprano lived in Binghamton you would probably find him at one of the dark corner tables in Cortese’s talking about someone who he is about to whack. The ambiance is very Italian with tons of wood low ceilings and waiters with red ties floating around the dining room. I sat at the bar and ordered a personal sized florentine pizza as chef sharron recommended. One thing to note is that Cortese’s is a pretty nice restaurant, it’s not a typical pizza shop where you walk in grab a slice and be on your way. Their pizza is all made to order and it takes time… It is also not cheap; my personal ‘square’ pizza was 7.25 which is equivalent in volume to 2 standard slices. .. In any event, the pizza came out 10 min after I ordered it nice and hot with small black splotches of burnt goodness. The nice thing about their pizza is that they bake the toppings underneath the cheese… so my spinach, onions and sour cream was all underneath a gooey layer of mozzarella. The pizza was pretty damn good, I will admit it. The dough was nice and sweet, the crust was thin and the cheese was perfectly melted. It was the first square pizza that I really enjoyed. My only complaint about it was that it was just a tad salty and difficult to eat, but this may have been due to its odd shape. Also it’s a little pricy for pizza. I still give my vote to Grande’s (New Yorkesk) but Cortese’s did impress me.

Here is a link to Cortese’s web site; their photos don’t give the place justice…
Cortese's