9370 Transit Rd., East Amherst, NY
Web: Molinaro's New York Pizza
Phone: 716.636.3191
Rating:
[learn more]Pros:
A strong selection of sweets, including multiple cannoli flavors, stands out at this Italian-American locale, which has a number of good renditions of low- to medium-grade favorites, particular Italian items.
Cons:
Subs, pizza, and wings are okay to good, not standouts; desserts aren't all strong.
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"The quality of these items was good, not great, and the red cannoli was fine but not up to snuff with the green Pistachio version. Stick to the traditional Italian foods here."
If there is any one thing that Western New York has in abundance relative to its home-grown specialty foods, that thing would be Italian restaurants - dozens and dozens of them, so many in fact that the Taste of Buffalo foodwalk this year looked more like the Italian Festival than a representation of local takes on global cuisine. Yet, despite or perhaps because of the sheer number of Italian places, the food's rarely memorable, and seldom purely Italian, and almost never enough to stand out from the crowd. Think of it as the slippery slope of pizza: once an Italian place starts to serve pizza, can chicken wings, onion rings, and the like be far behind? And at that point, it is really an Italian restaurant or just another pizza parlor?
Though it happens to serve wings, rings, submarine sandwiches, and pizza, Molinaro's is really an Italian restaurant; it has the focaccia bread, the Italian desserts, and the parmigianas to prove it. We're not going to go deep into the menu here; instead, we're going to focus mostly on the thing that brought us to Molinaro's - the cannoli's.
The Story: We happened to be in the area, perusing chocolates at Watson's, when someone within earshot said a magic word: cannoli. "Cannoli?," we asked, "where?" "Oh," she said, "the cannolis at Molinaro's a few doors down. They're great." Now, we've heard that before, but when someone says that particular phrase, we consider it worthy of immediate attention; hence, we found ourselves walking over to pick up a couple of cannolis just after walking out of Watson's with a bag of candy. Just another Saturday around Buffalo Chow, right?
Highs: She was, thankfully, correct. On our first visit, we grabbed two of the cannolis at $2.50 a pop - one white and plain, one green and pistacho, mistakenly missing the chance to grab a third and final flavor, a pink strawberry cheesecake, on the grounds that we already had plenty of dessert in the car. We've been regretting that mistake since then: on a subsequent visit, only the plain version was available, and we haven't had the chance to try strawberry cheesecake yet.
We care mostly because the other two exceeded our expectations. While we wouldn't put these cannolis in the league of NYC's vaunted Caffe Palermo, they were uncommonly tasty, with the plain ricotta version tending towards silky smooth with a slight milky taste, and the pistachio one surprisingly bolder and fuller, making the plain one taste comparatively light. On a followup visit, we found two of the plain ones to be even better than we recalled on the first visit - somewhere inbetween the original two, full and thick but still sweet and soft. Simply put, we would and will go back for these alone, even if we find more amazing ones nearby.
Though we were prepared to write Molinaro's up solely on the strength of its cannolis, we decided to sample more of the menu on our second visit, trying both some of the Italian fare - an eggplant parmigiana with side of spaghetti ($13), some focaccia bread, a caesar salad - and something non-Italian. The eggplant parmigiana was, like the cannoli, surprisingly delicious: Molinaro's renders part of it crispy, part soft, and all of it properly balanced with a rich red tomato sauce. This sauce, which trickles into the adjacent spaghetti, adding little bits of vegetables and a savory flavor, more than begs you to continue eating the pasta once you've finished the eggplant, something we wouldn't say about the too-often forgettable toss-in.
We loved the focaccia, too. A soft square of bread, individually baked, its crust was unmistakably garlicy and olive oiled, precisely the right level of crispiness to complement the warm, soft bread inside. Far too many times, focaccia comes out cold, apparently sliced from a day-old loaf, but this is the opposite - shockingly fresh and delicious for something that just happens to come with the entree.
A non-Italian item - onion rings ($3), a wing and pizza shop specialty - also hit just the right note. Properly battered to a level that's slightly soft but mostly crispy, rather than entirely one or the other, these sliced onions were fleshy and sweet, just as we like them. We needn't need any ketchup, salt, or other items to make them palatable; they were perfect as-is.
Lows: Our submarine sandwich, picked from a fairly extensive list of options, was a steak and cheese with mushrooms, onions, and provolone cheese ($5). While the sub was fine, it was skimpy on the mushrooms and steak, only decent on the bread, and not worth ordering a second time. Similarly, a $4 tiramisu looked outstanding, but lacked substantially for the dessert's signature amaretto flavor to go with its cream, ladyfingers, and flecked chocolate top. We'd stick to the cannolis.
The Verdict: We're not easily impressed by Italian restaurants, and are especially suspicious of the ones that dilute their menus with non-Italian fare, but Molinaro's proves that it's possible to straddle the fence in a satisfying way. While we would have gladly come back solely for the cannolis, the quality of the breads, parmigiana, rings and spaghetti - all of which we found to be very reasonably priced given their quantities and quality - have made this little shop worthy in our view of full meal status.
Updated: We subsequently went back for another visit and tried some additional items such as chicken wings, white pizza, another sub, and another salad, plus the Strawberry Cheesecake Cannoli. The quality of these items was good, not great, and the red cannoli was fine but not up to snuff with the green Pistachio version. Stick to the traditional Italian foods here.
