Pomodoro, Wilderness

25 September 2019

POMODORO

197 George Road, Wilderness

Our strike rate for this holiday was quite good. Four restaurants, four excellent dinners. Pomodoro was the fourth, after Serendipity, Zinzi and Le Maquis.

Pomodoro was the one of which I had the lowest expectation, regardless of the good things we’d heard about it, seeing as how it’s a trattoria in Wilderness village, smack dab in the centre of tourist trap-ville, even though it’s been here for ages and has always come well recommended.

Pomodoro was buzzing, at the outside tables and inside, when we arrived at about 19h30 but by 21h00 it was half empty. The hungryvores must come out early yet don’t linger.

The outside tables are ideal for warm evenings, and it must be lovely there on the muggy evenings I remember from summer holidays here, but we were sat inside in a corner at the rear in the cosy, comfortable and very much old school interior, below a huge painting of a dolce vita type scene.

We started (as has become the custom over this breakaway) with bubbly. Our young waiter didn’t understand our query of whether our choice was an MCC type product. It’s not champagne, he said, it’s just sparkling wine.  Scusi?  No prosecco?

A word of warning: the bottled water is expensive, imported Italian water in, well, bottles. This makes no sense. If you don’t offer prosecco or Italian beer, why must it be hellishly expensive water when there are not only equally good, much cheaper Italian or European brands, but also perfectly good local water. Does it make a material difference whether your water comes in a plastic container when one considers the price difference?

The bubbly, uh, sparkling wine, was not of the best but was drinkable. Afterward, in fear of roadblocks on the way back to our guesthouse, the wife drank Coke.  I had a 300 ml glass of Stella Artois draught. One would’ve thought an Italian joint would offer Peroni or Birra Moretti draught.

We shared a starter of focaccia with slices of fresh tomato, crumbed Feta cheese and basil pesto. With the proviso that we were rather peckish, not having eaten anything since brunch, the warm, crisp and fresh focaccia was an unadulterated treat. We devoured it.

The menu has pizza, pasta, meat and seafood dishes aplenty and everything reads as tempting. Apparently, the pizzas are excellent, but my immediate choice was gnocchi with a Gorgonzola sauce.  The wife did this thing she often does where she said she’d like the gnocchi with the Bolognaise(sic) sauce but then ordered a chicken dish, while musing aloud whether she made a mistake because she really wanted the gnocchi.

Change your order for the gnocchi, then! Which she wisely did.

The usual condiments of chilli, garlic and Parmesan cheese are served on the side.

The gnocchi was sublime. Every morsel just about melted in the mouth; soft, as it should be, and the cheese sauce was richly addictively cheesy. I first ate gnocchi, with a basil pesto sauce, in the late Eighties in a long defunct Cape Town restaurant in the old Waterkant, called Alibi and the nonpareil excellence of the dish blew my young, untutored mind.  Nothing will ever come close to that first blissful gnocchi experience, but the Pomodoro version was pretty close.

The wife loved the good Bolognese sauce, though it’s not the kind of sauce I want with gnocchi. I spooned the last of the Gorgonzola sauce from plate to mouth once the gnocchi was gone. This was dolce vita.

The wife finished her meal with a Frangelico Dom Pedro, and I had a serviceable tiramisu.

There is no shortage of eateries in Wilderness village and some, other than Pomodoro, were recommended to us, though we were reluctant to try any of them after studying the menus online or just casting an eye over the less than charming exteriors, plus we love Italian food, and this makes Pomodoro a no brainer. It’s molto bene that the food was so very satisfying. After three dinners of what one might call superior aspirations, it was good to eat simple food, made real good. Prego!