Sabatino’s Baltimore: The Emperor’s New Clothes
There are great restaurants ([Wallse](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/17)), and there are good restaurants ([Elmo](http://elmorestaurant.com/)). There are bad restaurants ([Artepasta](http://www.artepastanyc.com)) and mediocre restaurants ([Good](http://www.goodrestaurantnyc.com/)). There are even restaurants that aren’t that good, but you want to be good because they’re nearby (Trattoria Daniela) or they have a beautiful dining room ([Valbella](http://www.valbellany.com/homeny.html)) or a great wine list ([Bellavitae](http://www.bellavitae.com/)). Then, of course, there are restaurants that are egregiously awful, so bad that when offered a choice between them and Wendy’s, Wendy’s wins with unfettered enthusiasm (Malibu). Rarer still are those restaurants that are sub-Wendy’s that have the the trappings and reputation of something greater.
There is such a restaurant in Baltimore, and it is called Sabatino’s. Somehow, it gets glowing accolades from locals and tourists citywide, and when you visit their [website](http://sabatinos.com/), it seems as though people must be lined up around the block for their “bookmaker salad” and their house dressing by the jarful. And, well, they are; the place was packed. This is the part I don’t get: the food was awful. And just to be clear here, this isn’t picking apart a humble restaurant with an eye for *haute cuisine*, this restaurant was truly without merit and it is inconceivable to me how they could have any repeat business, in the middle of Little Italy with a dozen Italian Restaurants on either side.
Like most meals in American restaurants, we’ll start with the bread. Not everyplace can have [Amy's](http://amysbread.com/) bread, and even when places that go to the trouble to make their own, even from a mix, it’s a nice touch, if not the greatest. The bread presented to us at Sabatino’s, however, was stale, with a thin, sour crust (and I don’t mean sourdough, I mean sour) and a cakey Wonder Bread like interior that was neither as moist nor as flavorful as Wonder Bread, if that gives you any indication. Without even going into the dirty silverware and the melmac plates, the bread was an indication of things to come.
Next up was the “famous” bookmaker salad, a composed salad of wilted iceberg lettuce; supermarket salami; dry, disturbingly tangy provolone cheese, long past its prime; brined banana peppers that were brown and gaunt, basically rotten; and a few of the lowest quality, least flavorful shrimp I have ever encountered. This suspicious melange was completely inundated with a salty, vaguely acidic mixture loaded with the kind of grated cheese that comes out of a cadboard tube. It was reminiscent of a locker room, but not in a good way: busy, smelly and making me wonder why I was there. It did it’s job well enough though, I can’t tell you definitively how awful the shrimp tasted, because the dressing spared me tasting anything, except maybe the canned olives. The ferrous glutamate-aluminum flavor lingers in my memory.
Had I been on my own, or just with The Agent, the story might have ended differently. It might have ended with us getting up and leaving (and maybe going to Wendy’s). But I was out with other people, and we were celebrating something (or at least trying to) and so we soldiered on. Personally, I soldiered on to a “Veal Saltimbocca,” which in Italian means “jumps in the mouth.” It might be better named “Saltdallafinestra” or “jump out the window,” because I would prefer doing that to eating it again. Traditionally, Saltimbocca is a thin piece of veal cut from the leg and pounded completely flat. It sometimes is dredged in flour, but always is covered with a slice of prosciutto and a sage leaf, held in place by a toothpick. These pieces are briefly sauteed, and served with a light pan sauce, usually made with broth, but sometimes with white wine. Often, in America, it features some kind of melted cheese.
Regardless of how you feel about the purity of old culinary names, this is what I was served: thick pieces of tough veal (maybe it was veal, maybe it wasn’t), battered and fried, served with chopped up prosciutto-flavored beef jerky and a brown, primordial sauce, thick with cornstarch and almost crystalline with salt. The sauce was the viscosity of Campbell’s tomato soup, with the texture of motor oil. The only thing that can be said for the dish is that the thick blanket of collagen cheese on top prevented me from looking too closely at what I was eating. It’s in the top 5 worst meals of my life.
My companions didn’t fare any better. A lobster marinara with pasta was brown and mysterious and dishes like it were the reason I didn’t eat seafood until I was in high school. A piece of grouper was baked into submission with a slightly lighter, although identically flavored, version of the sauce on the veal. Two broccoli florets came along it, one raw, the other gray.
How these “legendary” restaurants remain open long after their heyday- if Sabatino’s ever had one- is beyond me. I suppose it’s because if everybody says it’s that good, it must be. How could they all be wrong? But, like a conversation about pizza in New York City, taste doesn’t always win out over conviction. For my dollar, the Emperor Sabatino is naked.
