New ‘Bruno’s’ lot like old one

Spaghetti and meat sauce (left) and manicotti pair for a $6.95 Thursday lunch special at Bruno’s Italian Bistro on North Bowman Road.
Spaghetti and meat sauce (left) and manicotti pair for a $6.95 Thursday lunch special at Bruno’s Italian Bistro on North Bowman Road.

— Yes, it’s in the same North Bowman Road spot that Bruno’s Little Italy occupied for more than two decades.

Yes, Bruno’s Italian Bistro is “family owned & operated.”

But it’s not the same family that ran Bruno’s Little Italy that owns and operates the bistro. Nor is the Bruno who is involved in this establishment related to or connected in any way to that family or that restaurant.

This is Bruno Beqiri, who has had a long history of short-lived area restaurants that have for about a decade and a half focused on various areas of the Mediterranean. The list includes Amore (the one in Conway was actually successful for a while, though restaurants of that name in Little Rock and Hot Springs tanked pretty quickly), DaVinci’s, Mona Lisa, La Bella Luna, Due Amiche and Mama Teresa’s.

A couple of disclaimers here: I’ve been a friend of the Bruno family — paterfamilias Jimmy Bruno, materfamilias Ernestine and sons Jay, Gio and Vince — for more than three decades, and spent a lot of time in their kitchens on Bowman Road and, before that, Old Forge Drive. (I wasn’t early enough in town to have visited the original Roosevelt Road building that housed the restaurant from the late ’40s to the late ’70s.)

And I’ve known Beqiri since he opened DaVinci’s in west Little Rock 15 years ago. He’s a nice guy, and I can say with some authority that none of his restaurants, or at least none of them I’ve eaten at, failed because people weren’t happy with the food.

The menu at Bruno’s Italian Bistro, though it uses different recipes, has a lot of similarities to the one at the former (and hopefully future) Bruno’s Little Italy: house-made pasta, veal, chicken and seafood dishes, as well as a New York-style pizza.

Beqiri’s a native of Albania, which is on the other side of the Adriatic Sea from Italy (separated by the Strait of Otranto). But he knows Italian food.

In all the years he has been involved in the local restaurant scene, however, he has not learned how to spell Italian food. We twitted him for spelling “spaghetti” four different ways on a menu; here, the bill of fare has a dozen and a half howlers, including four different spellings of the popular Italian grated cheese: “parmagian,” “parmasian,” “parmasean” and, finally, “parmesan,” which is actually correct.

He still knows how to cook.

Even something as simple as the $6.95 lunch-special half manicotti, half spaghetti and meat sauce, was a joy. The manicotti was a somewhat flabby pasta shell wrapping a three-cheese blend (mozzarella, ricotta and “parmasian”), topped with a rich, bright-red marinara sauce with plenty of melted mozzarella on the top. The spaghetti, while nowhere near al dente, was firm enough; the meat sauce is slightly astringent and not sweet, a big plus, and may actually have had more ground beef in it than tomatoes.

The portions of everything we tried were huge, so you may not want to start with an appetizer, but if you do, go for the Stuffed Mushrooms ($9.99), a half-dozen monstrous vinegarmarinated mushroom caps, stuffed with a dense, slightly mushy but delicious mixture of, not crab meat, as the menu says, but that surimi quasi-crab, plus cheese, bread crumbs and lots of garlic, garnished with pimento strips and covered with a vivid, garlicky pink sauce.

We were considerably disappointed, however, by the Toasted Ravioli ($8.99), a foodservice-prefab product that was more inadequate than bad. We asked for the cheese-filled variety on a to-go order and got the meat-filled instead.

The Veal Scallopine ($15.99) was superb, thin-sliced and fairly tender scalloped veal sumptuously sauteed in a mushroom-marinara sauce and served over spaghetti.

We cannot, however, recommend as fully the Linguine ala Vangole ($12.99), and not just because Beqiri misspelled it (the Italian word for clams is “vongole”). The sauce was right, chopped clams sauteed with garlic and white wine (too many places use a cream version); the pasta, a flat noodle not as wide as fettucine, is tossed in it. But the dish had a bitter tang that put us off.

Our 14-inch pizza ($10.99 plus $1.59 per topping) was one of the best we’ve had since Bruno’s Little Italy closed in October. The sauce was well balanced; Beqiri puts spices and garlic into it instead of sprinkling them over the top. The handtossed crust held up admirably under the weight of that, plentiful melted cheese and the generous spread of mushrooms, black olives and the mild, house-made Italian sausage (which makes us want to go back and try one of the three sausage entrees).

Beqiri is partnering with a family that runs the Brady Resort and Restaurant in Royal (thus the “family owned & operated” line), which runs the front of the house. Service, by a young staff, was friendly and competent.

Beqiri is not repeating the mistake the Dona’s folks made: He put in for a beer and wine license before he opened and expects that that will come through this week, possibly even by the time you read this. Call ahead.

Bruno’s Italian

Bistro

Address: 315 N. Bowman Road, Little Rock

Hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m.Tuesday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday

Cuisine: Italian

Credit cards: V, MC, AE, D

Alcoholic beverages: Wine/ beer license pending

Reservations: Large parties

Wheelchair accessible: Yes

Carryout: Yes

(501) 225-5000

Weekend, Pages 33 on 09/20/2012

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