Magica Roma did not cast a positive spell

 13 July 2024

 

MAGICA ROMA

8 Central Building, Central Square, Pinelands, Cape Town

 

Sometimes, what’s billed as magic is just smoke and mirrors.

 

It was a literally dark and stormy night when the wife and I met two friends at this venerable establishment, allegedly going for nigh on 50 years, I hadn’t even heard of a couple of weeks ago. We don’t frequent the dining establishments of this burg; the Hoghouse in Ndabeni is as close as we get.

 

Our friends are apparently well acquainted with Magica Roma, hadn’t been there for a while though and were keen on introducing us to this institution.

 

Earlier in the day, we’d speculated whether, in true Capetonian style, we should take a raincheck (see what I did there?) on this very cold, wet night when the Peninsula was being battered by seriously inclement weather, but in the end we braved the long journey, buoyed by the seeming good fortune of leaving home during a dry spell. However, when we stopped at Central square canines and felines were pelting from the cloudy heavens.

 

So, Magica Roma is a restaurant in a strip mall and doesn’t look like much from outside. It’s not much more stylish inside either, being as simplistically basic as you can get, the kind of trattoria where you clearly don’t pay for the décor but for traditional Italian comfort food like someone’s nonna used to cook. For me, comfort food doesn’t come any better than a good, solid plate of pasta.

 

If Magica Roma has been trading for 50 years, it must have cast a spell on its patrons, I guess. It was quite busy despite the adverse weather but at the end of the night we weren’t enchanted.

 

The menu boasts a good variety of starters, pastas, meat, seafood and pizza dishes and all of them certainly read as enticing. Right at the start, the wife enquired about the dessert options (as she does) and, on being told that there was only one portion of the homemade apple pie left, forthwith put my name on it. She’s considerate like that.

 

Initially, I vacillated uncharacteristically between options, because of the variety, but decided on linguine Montanara, with a veal ragu, mushrooms, onion and tomato sauce (R190).

 

Not knowing much about veal (this was my first taste of it) or the cooking thereof, I would say that my dish had diced veal rather than a ragu, which I think of as shredded meat but it was well cooked, had decent flavour and the pasta was good. It’s not a dish I’d order again; it did the job yet failed to chain me to its voodoo.

 

The wife’s choice was Scaloppine di Vitello Isacco (veal dish) flavoured with lemon, white wine, mushrooms and sage, and accompanied by plain pasta rather than fries or a baked potato (R270). She says that the veal presented with an unpleasant aroma when it was in front of her and that the meat wasn’t as tender and succulent as she’d experienced it elsewhere. It wasn’t wonderful. 

The pasta was about as good as plain pasta could be.

 

In retrospect, she should’ve returned the dish but she was hungry and, schooled in politeness, didn’t want to offend our friends.  

 

Our male friend had a mushroom pasta and his wife had the sole. They seemed to be happy with their choices; there were no complaints.

 

The guy’s dessert was ice cream with chocolate sauce, something it’s probably insanely difficult to mess up.  

 

The two women shared a crème brûlée and a tiramisu. The first wasn’t much good either. The wife thought it was typical of a dessert that had been made much earlier, perhaps the previous day, and still had the ineffable essence of freezer about it. The tiramisu was proper and far better.

 

I could have had cream or ice cream with my apple tart but declined those options because I prefer my apple straight.  With hindsight I shouldn’t have been that purist.

 

The apple tart resembled a very thin pizza crust with sliced, caramelised apple, a little like a tarte tatin, though it wasn’t described as such, and seemed quite forlorn and slightly melancholy alone on the plate. A dollop of ice cream would no doubt have cheered it up.  The taste was good, the apple was just the right side of al dente and not overly sweet but I must say it wasn’t worth reserving specially.

I don’t know what the desserts are priced at, or what the total bill came to, as our friends, to our surprise, paid for everything.

 

As I’ve said, Magica Roma must be popular if it can draw a virtually full house on an unpleasant night but it’s not for us. The food simply wasn’t good enough to merit a return, not when we have, for example, The Woodlands Eatery on our doorstep for when we crave Italian cuisine.