Cantone's Southern Italian - Colonial Park

Overall Rating: Save Your Money
Highlight: It could have been worse
Lowlight: We paid way too much for what we got
Veggie Note: There's not a very diverse selection of vegetarian options here, and the default seems to lean towards meaty everything.

This restaurant was recommended to us by several people as a great spot to get some home-cooking style Italian food.

Cantone's is a southern Italian style restaurant off the main drag in the Colonial Park area of Harrisburg. It was actually a little nicer and more comfortable in the dining room than we had anticipated, having come from the land of good, cheap Italian restaurants that tend to skimp on their interior design efforts. We were asked if we had reservations, which we did not, but that didn't prevent us from being seated right away (we just ended up way in the back). There is a bar here, and they had a pretty nice selection of beers on tap (more than just the many varieties of Bud, which all taste like dirty dish water to me). The menu was swimming with super-meaty dishes, which is no surprise considering it's southern Italian style. There were three meatless dishes and then a build your own pasta section.

We had the following:

Complimentary:

• Bread Basket - after ordering our entrees we received a basket of warm Italian bread, crusty on the outside and soft in the center. It was pretty good.

Entrees:

• Eggplant Parmigiana - comes with a choice of Marinara or Mrs. C's sauce. Mrs. C's sauce is their meat sauce, so obviously I went with the Marinara. Too bad though. It was definitely missing the love that I bet Mrs. C's sauce has in it. It was about as exciting as a jar of Ragu. The fried eggplant slices were okay, they probably were freshly cut and breaded, but there was nothing about them that couldn't have been reproduced from frozen eggplant out of a box. The dish also comes with some spaghetti. It was cooked al dente, but was also pretty boring. I ate about half of this dish and really struggled to decide if I wanted to bother taking the rest home. It didn't take me long to remember that this dish cost me $15 and I darn well better get my money's worth, so I took the rest home to eat later with hopes it would be better the second time around (I ended up eating it for breakfast, being able to be lazy and just reheat leftovers added something to this dish, but not much).
• Penne Spinaca - This dish was definitely more interesting than the eggplant. The spinach was fresh, not frozen. The sun dried tomatoes may have been a bit too populous, but you can eat around them. It was plenty garlicky and nice. There was nothing special about this pasta either. It definitely looked fancier on the plate than the eggplant did, and it smelled better too.
• Side Salad - both entrees came with a side salad (Ceaser salad costs $2 extra, not that we would order one due to anchovies usually being in the dressing, but jeez, that's a pretty steep extra fee for something like that). It was just a salad. I opted for the homemade bleu cheese dressing, even though it came wiht an extra 75 cent price tag. It was not worth tacking that extra cost onto the bill. I definitely couldn't tell it was homemade and not mass-produced.

Just a few other notes:

I have had good home-style Italian cooking, at home and in restaurants before. There was nothing particularly wrong with the food here, but it wasn't extra-super special, even though the prices said otherwise. $15 for spaghetti noodles, plain marinara sauce, and some breaded eggplant is astounding. I can get three whole pounds of plain old pasta (with meat) from Pizza Hut for $12.99 (not that I ever would) and that also comes with bread. So what was I paying for here? There was definitely a nice family atmosphere, lots of folks talking, having fun, enjoying a meal together. That's great I guess. And maybe they are really knocking it out of the park with their meat dishes, but those all came priced at $20 or higher.

There was also a vegetarian baked capponatta on the menu. I considered ordering this but I just wasn't in the mood for it's Burgundy Wine Marinara sauce, it seemed to heavy for me by it's description. The build your own pasta section is essentially choose your pasta and choose your sauce for $12-15. Pretty steep again for noodles and sauce. Want to add some veggies? That'll cost you $1 per vegetable (only broccoli and spinach are offered).

You might be able to order some of their other pasta specialties without the meat (there was a lot of ham in many of these dishes) but I would not count on getting a price reduction considering how many you get nickel and dimed to death with "additional costs" for almost everything else.

We had a friend with us who ended not ordering anything at all. Part of that can be attributed to having eaten a ton of rice about an hour earlier at a picnic, but part of that also comes from it just not being worth the money to get what was being offered, and that nothing really jumped off the menu as a spectacular find.

Final Thoughts: There's something about this place that makes people love it, but I don't know what it is. Meat maybe? Atmosphere possibly? I guarantee you it's not the fabulous deals and the great vegetarian dishes, bummer. I doubt we'll be back here.

Carley's Ristorante - Downtown Harrisburg

Overall Rating: Good Food, Mediocre Service
Highlight: Yummy Gnocchi
Lowlight: Over-fried Olives and Disconnected Server
Veggie Note: A handful of vegetarian dishes occur on the menu, but they are not listed as such so you have to read carefully and be able to translate some Italian ingredients

On a Sunday night a lot of downtown restaurants are closed, so we were happy to find an opportunity here for dinner with a visiting out of town friend.

Carley’s Ristorante is a trendy downtown Italian restaurant with a diverse menu and ample wine list. It was not too busy here considering the limited number of choices on a Sunday night. This was also day one of the first ever restaurant week in Harrisburg. We perused the special menu for the event, but no vegetarian choices were available so we ordered from the standard dinner menu. We had to decide between a few nice sounding appetizers and entrees. Luckily there were three of us so we could sample several and share.

We had the following:

Complimentary:

• Crusty Italian Bread – after we ordered our dinner we were brought a basket of warm crusty bread. It was flaky on the outside and soft and delicious in the middle. There was a bottle of olive oil on our table which was absolutely delicious, no bulk food, low-quality taste here at all.

Appetizer:

• Olive Ripieni – described in the menu as stuffed olives (cheese and pepper) with a garlic aioli dipping sauce, these olives came to our table breaded and deep fried, which was a surprise to us. I like fried olives, so we didn’t have a big problem with this, but it should definitely be mentioned in the description here. These olives were also overcooked; the breading was tough and dry. If you cut them open and pulled the olives out, they were still slightly moist inside. The aioli was very mild, missing a distinct garlic flavor, and could have passed for ordinary mayonnaise (which is fair considering that’s essentially what it is). The family size was plenty for the three of us.

Entrees:

• Ravioli di Ricotta al Burro e Salvia – Cheese ravioli with butter sage sauce, was tender fresh pasta with a light filling. The butter sauce had some sort of flavor added, maybe a vinegar, that was slightly strong and overpowering. There were fresh tomatoes added as well, not described on the menu. As we were finishing our meal, I noticed other servers offering freshly grated cheese to their customers, ours did not offer us that and this dish definitely would have benefitted from the addition.
• Risotto alla Millanese– The way this risotto is described on the menu, it definitely gives you the idea that it will be delightfully accompanied by olives, capers, tomatoes, basil, etc… but it was really just risotto with a minimal amount of the additions. It was still good risotto, but again not quite the way it was described in the menu.
• Gnocchi Putanesca – The highlight entrée from these three, these gnocchi were fabulously tender and the putanesca had plenty of kalamata olives and capers mixed in. This dish was a definite A+. Note that this is not the gnocchi dish listed on the online menu (at the time this was written).

Dessert:

• Amaretto Macaroons – four macaroons were served on a plate with a drizzle of chocolate sauce and caramel. The macaroons were good, a little saltier than would be expected and definitely cold in the center like they had been frozen. Four was plenty to share among two people, too bad we didn’t do that. We ended up leaving two behind (we would have liked to have taken them home but our server forgot that we asked for box and was too busy to come back to help us much once we had our check in hand, too bad)
• Zuppa Inglese - a trifle of chocolate and vanilla mousse with a mascarpone layer on top. This was a delicious treat and very well made. It was rich and heavy and could have been shared as well (although two of us each finished our own without too much effort).

Just a few other notes:

Our server, right from the start, apologized for his service, saying he was “shaky tonight.” He seemed rushed every time he came to check on us, sometimes not even stopping moving as we made requests, asked questions, etc… Most of the servers seemed to be on the ball here though so I wouldn’t call it an all-around problem at Carley’s.

A nice wine list and martini menu was presented to us without request. We ordered a bottle of wine, Italian pinot grigio, to suit our meal. It would have been nice to see a few local selections here, but they did not exist.

This restaurant is very lovely decorated and “live” piano music accompanied our meal (it was player piano).

There is a nice looking baked tomato dish listed on the online menu which was not on the current menu at the restaurant. Be prepared for the menu to be different when you get there as well.

Final Thoughts: It was really nice for three of us to order three different vegetarian meals without having to ask for any substitutions, special requests, etc. It would have been so much better if our service was a little more with it, but I would recommend this as a good downtown vegetarian choice.

Nonna's Italian Restaurant - New Cumberland

Overall Rating: Ta-da!
Highlight: Veggie Meatballs and Sausage
Lowlight: BYOB
Veggie Note: This is a great vegetarian find! Menu is very specific and choices are astounding.

Stumbled upon this restaurant when cruising for some good Italian fare with an out-of-town, non-vegetarian friend.


Nonna's Italian Restaurant is a casual but still nice Italian restaurant located above a store front in downtown New Cumberland. It is a climb up a full flight of stairs to get to the dining room, but worth it if you can do it. We called ahead to make reservations since it was a Saturday night, but we did not need them. It got more crowded as we ate though, so it might not hurt. The menu had a wide variety of traditional Italian dishes with several special touches mixed in. There were specific sections listing vegetarian and vegan entrees on the menu and their soups were specifically marked vegetarian as well -two thumbs up to that, we love soup!



We had the following:

Complimentary:

• Fresh Baked Bread and Oil - the bread was tasty - crusty and warm and the dipping oil/vinaigrette was a nice touch as well. Refills came quickly.

Soup:

• Escarole Efagioli - since we love soup, we are very critical of soup. This was a well made soup; however it was a little sweet for our tastes and could have used just a bit more seasoning.

Entrees:

• Vegan Sausage with Peppers - This came served on Penne, and is usually topped with the house marinara sauce, but we spied fresh vodka sauce on another part of the menu and asked for a switch - no problem. Too bad the vodka sauce wasn't tops. It was a little thin and under seasoned (becoming a slight trend here) but the whole dish was still very good and the sausage was awesome! It's so nice to be able to add veggie sausage to a dish in a restaurant for a change. These treats are often reserved for vegetarian home-cooking.

• Penne with Vegan Meatballs - same deal here with the vodka sauce, it was requested switch from what would have been the marinara again (which is what allows them to list it as vegan). The meatballs were also very good. They were very familiar and we think they may have been Quorn brand, or at least very similar. (Quorn is our favorite brand of veggie meatballs, we highly recommend them). In both cases the penne was cooked well. Fresh grated cheese was on our table when we were seated, it was also a nice addition.

• Agli Olio - Our non-vegetarian friend who joined us made the most special requests of the three of us (funny since we're usually the ones swapping out ingredients and removing meat from things). The agli olio is usually served with linguini, but the waitress had no problem swapping it for angel hair (although the kitchen did because they put it on linguini anyway - it was quickly fixed however) and then adding some fresh veggies (from the primavera blend) and fresh mozzarella. This was a very tasty dish and a very full plate (it made for a late night snack for two later that night and also breakfast for one the next day - that's right, I said breakfast).

• Salad - came with every entree. It was very fresh. The bleu cheese dressing was amazing, for those who are dairy eaters. My partner said the house vinaigrette was just as good on the salad as it was on the bread earlier.

Just a few other notes:
Nonna's is BYOB. That can be a real bummer if you're not prepared; luckily we spied that detail on their website before we left the house so we took along a couple bottles of what we had in the fridge. Our server quickly brought us some glasses for those, and I noticed plenty other folks had brought along various beverages that were all accommodated just as well.


Our server was very friendly and dealt very well with all of our special requests.


Parking is on street and we drove past a few times trying to find Nonna's, their sign is not very obvious. Give yourself a few extra minutes the first time you go.


Final Thoughts: I'm guessing a lot of local vegetarians are aware of Nonna's. They clearly cater to that crowd, which is great. I'm being completely honest though when I say that we totally just stumbled on this one. Hopefully we are helping to get the word out here. We will definitely go back some day.