Colosseo Ristorante Italiano

Colosseo Ristorante Italiano

670 Corydon Av

204-284-4977

204-284-9865

Fax:  204-477-9640

https://www.colosseo.ca/

February, 2022

Since 1973, Colosseo has been an anchor of Little Italy; today, it serves some of the finest, upscale Italian food in the city, and it remains as one of the few Italian restaurants still in Little Italy along Corydon.  While I'm glad to see the variations of food types blossom in the area, I'm also happy to see this establishment continue to thrive and represent the European boot.

The atmosphere looks Italian, complete with arches at the entryway and faux-stone on the interior.  The painted sky ceiling doesn't quite make you think you're outside, but it it adds an air of openness.  

I love opera, especially Italian opera (Puccini is my favourite composer) but I'm not sure it's the proper background music for the atmosphere.  While there are some operatic comedies, most (and the best) are all tragedies and I'm not sure tragically powerful and heartbreaking music is the perfect accompaniment to a lovely meal.  I would probably pump out some Italian folk music but hey, opera will never bother me.  

Service is ultra efficient and friendly, including the busser who often comes to retrieve plates and refill glasses.  Speaking of glasses, if you order wine by the glass, you get a six-ounce glass and it's filled right to the rim.  If you order a bottle, you get proper, large glasses with room to swirl and appreciate your wines.  

The extensive wine list features mostly Italian selections, although the whites offer alternatives to the paucity of Italian whites.  Reds range from the light and fruity Valpolicellas to the big and powerful Barolo and Amarone.  

For appetisers, the Breadsticks come oven-hot, steaming and smoking where your bare hands are unable to break them apart.  Once they cool enough for you to get at them, the outside provides a lovely crunch to the bite and the still-hot insides taste velvety soft to the palate.  

The Colosseo Salad lives up to its namesake of being colossal; this is the half portion:

There's plenty of fresh and crisp greens to go around but it's the enormous amounts of salami and ham that dominates the plate.  As you can see, there's no shortage of cheese to make sure that this salad is anything but light.  The special house dressing is a vinaigrette kind of blend but it's easily overwhelmed by the massive flavour and heft of the meats. Upon seeing this intro salad, I wasn't sure if there's going to be room for anything else.  If you like having salad as a starter, consider sharing.  You must leave room enough to have one of the mains.

I love seafood--I really do.  One of my life's great regrets comes with living in a landlocked city where the rivers are so polluted, you don't want to eat any of the life that's in it.  I'm just ok with white fish but I eat sushi fishes by the tons.  Any crustacean is a good crustacean.  Crawfish especially are my friends--well not really, because I want to eat them by the truckload.  I love bivalves very much as well.  I've been known to eat almost a hundred live oysters in one sitting.  I can eat mounds of mussels (if they're cooked right, which is rare in this city).  If I had to pick only one bivalve, it would be the clam.  I have clams every time I'm on a coast and Linguine alle Vongole is one of my all time favourite dishes.

I want the unadulterated taste of the delicious clams, so when I make Vongole, I may add a bit of light, white wine (like a Pinot Gris), some garlic, extra virgin olive oil, scallions and perhaps a touch of herbs like thyme.  It's all the wonderful juices extracted from the clams that I want to taste.

Sadly again, when you're in a landlocked city, you get what you can, and it's often the lowest quality and high priced because it's imported.  Clams we get here are rather tasteless and they often need something to help them out.  

I'm sure the restaurant does the best they can to source good ingredients but geography plays a large part.  When I make clams here, I often boost the flavour with ingredients like butter and cream.  That's exactly what Colosseo does.

There is no shortage of clams here; the photo does it no justice.  By the time I'm done, I must have eaten 30 clams, even though it doesn't look like it in the shot.  With all those clams, the juice should be out-of-this-world good.  The sauce is excellent, but that's because it's loaded with whipping cream and probably butter.  It's a delicious dish--don't get me wrong--but it's pure, and it's unadulterated clam flavour is what I love.  This is just good (very good).  The pasta tastes a tad south of al dente, but still perfectly acceptable.

If pizza is more up your alley, Colosseo offers a number of special combinations or you can build your own.  The Special comes with pepperoni, mushrooms, sausage, bacon, green peppers and cheese.

Just looking at the image tells you that there's a disparity among the ingredients.  While you see oodles of meat everywhere, there are only a few slices of green peppers, and you have to look very hard to find shards of mushrooms.  

To me, a pizza should have plenty of toppings, and they need to disperse all of the ingredients well and evenly throughout the pie.  Cut the green pepper slices down to cube so you can distribute them better.  There's a ton of meat; thin it out so it covers every part of the surface.  For goodness sake, add some more mushrooms to this poor meal.  The ingredients should be spread out so that each and every bite is the perfect bite, containing at least a bit of each ingredient.  

Some ingredients are expensive, like the meat.  May pizza joints scrimp on the meat and you get tiny slivers here and there.  They are very generous with the meat here--that's great but let's get some to the edges.  Mushrooms are dirt cheap--why are they skimping on the mushrooms!  Gimme more mushrooms!

There's plenty of cheese--that's critical.  Cheese makes the pizza and its oozy-goozy goodness.  Cheese provides the backbone and the umami to the plate and it holds everything together.  There's nothing sadder than those pathetic pizzas that only have a tiny sprinkling of cheese.  The sauce puts body and depth into the pie and I would like to see a bit more here.

The battle between dough versus toppings being the key ingredient in pizza has been around as long as Italy has been a boot.  As a fair food writer, you probably expect me to be neutral and unbiased in this battle.  

I'm not.  It's the topping that makes the pizza folks!  C'mon!  Think about it!  How ludicrous would it be to argue that the slices of bread makes the sandwich!  That the buns make the hamburger!  That the wrapping makes the pierogi!  That the rice paper makes the dumpling!  That the tortilla makes the taco!  

All the flavour is in the toppings (and the sauce); without those, the crust is just dough.  Yes, a better crust makes a better pizza but the crust can only do so much.  And here, Colosseo's crust does as much as crust can physically do.  It tastes crunchy on the bottom, smooth and buttery as it melts in your mouth, and fluffy enough to hug the ingredients and impart their flavours.  This is some of the best crust I've ever tasted and it is a contributor to this wonderful pizza.

Colosseo has been an anchor in Little Italy for a long time, dating back to when it was actually Little Italy, as opposed to the present day Little Bit of Everything.  I hope it continues to be around for a long, long time as time and vintage has done little to affect the consistently high quality of food offered here.  

This is an unbiased, free public service that I am happy to provide.  If you enjoy these reviews, please consider clicking on the accompanying ads.  This is the only compensation I receive. 

For continuous updates, please follow me on Facebook @RayYuenRestaurantReview.  As usual, thanks for reading and good food to you!

Ray Yuen, Pit Master / Grill Master
Certified Kansas City Barbecue Society Judge – Badge #97736
Certified Steak Cook-off Association Judge – Badge #7788
Canadian Barbecue Society Member