Mona Lisa's is arguably the best place to dine with wine between Madison and Bay City.
Lisa Aspenson, the "Lisa" of Mona Lisa's, personally tastes and chooses every wine the restaurant pours.
Mona's superb by-the-glass selection changes often - sometimes daily - and always lists 20-plus uncommon reds and whites, many under $5 and most under $6. The graceful Fortessa and Riedel wine glasses are a pleasure to sip from.
Mona's main wine list offers some 150 additional wines from selected small vineyards of Italy, Spain, France, California and Washington state, with many bottles less than $25 and many more less than $30.
Most important: Mona's also does a better job of helping diners choose wine than any restaurant we know. Many restaurants now suggest wine pairings for entrees; Mona's has been doing this for years. But Mona's goes much further: the wine list offers informative and delicious descriptions - in five to 50 words - of every wine sold here.
It's a graduate course in wine tasting.
At Mona's, it's fun to choose a wine based on its description, and then to try the entree it's paired with. A Valentine's Day description of a white wine captivated us: "Beautiful pure nose of flowers, passion fruit, pears, Chanel No. 5, and star anise. Nicely wound structure and texture. Not so much viscous as velvety. Great length with pears galore on the palate," $6 (Viognier grape; K Vintners; Washington state).
This led us to spinach and ricotta ravioli with three sauces: light cream with sage and thyme, roasted butternut squash puree and a drizzle of syrup made of sun-dried tomatoes and reduced balsamic vinegar, $18. The wine coped well with the dish's tasty but quickly monotonous soft creaminess and refreshed our mouths for more.
Mona's entree menu changes weekly and seasonally, within fairly predictable limits. There's always a good selection of fresh fish and shellfish, a couple of standard beefsteaks, pastas with vegetables, boneless chicken breasts and tenders.
Preparations are loosely "Mediterranean" in orientation. That typically means Italian, with less-frequent nods to Greece or Spain. But fusion and flexibility are also hallmarks.
The Grilled Sausage alla Puttanesca tossed rigatoni pasta with a near-classic Italian Puttanesca sauce - fresh tomatoes, olives, capers, garlic, fresh herbs and anchovies, but no hot red peppers - then garnished it with a generous handful of Greek-style feta cheese and two excellent spicy-hot American-Italian sausages from Chicago, $17. A dish of memorable flavors, although ours was too oily.
Current dishes that break the Mediterranean mold in whole or part include shrimp with Jamaican-influenced "jerk" spices, $19; tuna with raspberry-chipotle sauce, $24; seafood gumbo with Cajun spices, $24; Coconut-Thai Chicken, $15; and Penne with Chicken and Shiitake Mushrooms in a Ginger-Lime Cream Sauce, $16.
Our favorite entree was an almost-inch-thick swordfish steak pan-grilled to crisp on one side; sauced with vodka, vermouth and juniper berries; and buttered with a gently garlicky green-olive tapenade, $19. The interplay of herbal-astringent alcohol with the tasty fish and unctuous olives was wonderful.
Consider splitting an entree at Mona's - the "plate charge" for sharing is just $2 - or even skipping entrees altogether. This will let you focus on the restaurant's usually outstanding first courses, all of which can and should be shared. It also will guarantee variety.
We enjoyed the Wonton Shrimp - which were wrapped in strips of wonton dough and broiled until crisp when we had them - with baby lettuce in a perky ginger vinaigrette, $10. And we highly recommend the popular Tomato Chutney Medley, $11: a sweet-tart and spicy-hot Indian chutney, whole heads of perfectly roasted garlic, cool red grapes and an oozingly hot wedge of mild Cambozola cheese, an inspired Bavarian cross between Camembert and Gorgonzola. Spread, squeeze, daub, mix, squash and layer at will on the accompanying flaky flatbread.
Soups and salads are also good. Watch for the simple tomato-basil-garlic soup and the warming Italian White Bean, $3 a cup. A friend of ours has trouble not ordering the roasted red beet salad with blue cheese and walnuts in a sherry and Dijon- mustard vinaigrette, $7.
Because we love hand-tossed, puffy-edged pizzas with minimal toppings, we shouldn't like Mona's pizzas at all. They're mini- casseroles of chunky-moist ingredients heaped on a crunchy, cracker-thin crust.
The Portobello Pizza's mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach and basil leaves tasted fresh though not compelling, $12. But the so-called BLT Pizza combined Gorgonzola and mozzarella cheeses, Nueske's magnificent applewood-smoked bacon, fresh basil and tomatoes and dollops of Mona's red sauce into something it was hard to stop eating.
If there's panna cotta or tiramisu on the menu, split a dessert. The panna cotta is an impossibly silken, sexy pudding of heavy cream, sugar, vanilla and gelatin; ours came topped with a gorgeous crimson syrup made of red wine, $6. The tiramisu is luscious and balanced, matching richly sweet mascarpone cheese and whipped cream against the bitter of raw cocoa and the edgy aromatics of coffee liqueur, $5.
Main Course, the Leader-Telegram's restaurant review column, runs the fourth Sunday of the month. Diners' Notebook, a sampling of favorite restaurant offerings, runs the second Tuesday of the month. |
