Vinny's

Rack of New Zealand lamb in East Somerville? Just follow the yellow sub-shop light.

by Stephen Heuser

76 Broadway (Sullivan Square), Somerville; 628-1921
Open for lunch Mon-Fri, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.,
and for dinner Tues-Thurs, 4:30 to 10:30 p.m.
and Fri and Sat, 4:30 to 11 p.m.
AE, MC, Visa
No liquor
Sidewalk-level access, but bathrooms are up a few steps.

Some restaurants burst into your life in a blizzard of PR and gossip. Others just sneak around the back. And a very few make you sneak around the back. Vinny's is the third kind. If you look it up in the white pages, it's called Vinny's Superette, and it's a convenience store and deli on Somerville's Broadway. If you show up after dark, it's called Vinny's at Night, and it's a curtained-off dining room on a side street called Hathorn, serving the kind of chops you tell your friends about.

The place might feel like a hideaway, but Vinny's is an open secret in East Somerville. The clientele reflects the neighborhood -- there are young couples out on a date, and then there's the old crowd, guys who slap each other hello and spend the night talking point spreads and boxing. The food is robust and Sicilian and probably keeps an entire tomato distributor in business. The dinner operation is run by a sweet-natured young guy whom everyone calls Little Vinny (Big Vinny, his uncle, owns the place and cooks lunch). On a slow night, Little Vinny is your waiter and he might sit down at your table to talk for a minute. On a busy night, there's a waitress and a busboy and Little Vinny has his hands full as maitre d'.

The menu is a single sheet of paper printed on both sides. If it looks confusing at first, take heart: without actually saying as much, the menu breaks down into pasta, things served over pasta, and things served with a side of pasta. Let me recommend the third group very strongly: the two dishes I ordered in this category were stellar. But first things first.

The first thing is the self-serve antipasto table, which is set against a wall near the door and looks like a salad bar. I wish I'd remembered to count the number of antipasto dishes here: they cover so much of the table you can barely reach the ones in back. For $5.50 you get a plate and a license to pile on as much stuff as you can fit. We tried slices of smoked mozzarella and chunks of an aged cheese; we tried little caponata-like stews of various vegetables. We tried traditional goodies like arancini (fried rice balls) and goodies the chef just made up, like lamb-and-pignoli meatballs. We ate green olives, cured black olives, marinated mushrooms, and salami. One antipasto plate even held little cold wedges of broccoli pizza. It was all more hearty than precise; the cumulative effect was like being inside a book about the bounty of the Sicilian table.

There are more appetizers available à la carte, like calamari salad ($5.95), a wide plate with mesclun laid under giant sautéed squid rings, all in a vinegar dressing with shredded basil leaves and cracked pepper. Or a caprese salad ($6.95), an acre of tomato wedges and rounds of fresh white mozzarella drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, again with shredded basil. The Vinnies aren't shy about putting a lot of food on the plate.

Or on two plates, which happens at dinner if you order meat with a side of pasta. At one dinner, I tried lamb chops ($15.95) with scallion mashed potatoes instead of pasta, which seemed somehow to contradict the spirit of the place. Little Vinny didn't mind, and the lamb was lovely: a row of those small, tender New Zealand lamb chops, broiled with nothing but a bit of rosemary for flavor. Meanwhile, my girlfriend was making imperceptible progress through a giant plate of chicken sausage over pasta ($12.95), in which slices of a soft, clearly homemade chicken sausage were laid over a mound of fusilli topped with a sauce of plum tomato and basil.

The theme of meat with pasta took many forms. One was a combo plate ($14.95) of puffy round ravioli stuffed with ricotta (a little bland); fine Italian sausages; and a handful of enormous peeled shrimp, coated with olive oil and tossed on the grill till they curled up and absorbed a nice smoky taste. Another was a plate of mussels over linguine ($12.95), the pasta dressed in garlic and olive oil, carefully ringed like a sun with 10 or so plump mussels on the half-shell.

Lobster fra diavolo ($16.95) had a whole lobster's worth of meat, both tail meat and claw. The sauce could have been spicier, but it's hard to argue with that much lobster. We ordered it over linguine, but as with all the pasta here, we had a choice: linguine, ziti, angel hair, fusilli.

Vinny's seems to be at its best with meat, straight up. A piece of roast pork ($11.95) was delightful and absolutely unexpected in its elegance: on a plate came a single thick loin chop, covered with vinegared hot peppers, both red and yellow, and surrounded by a pool of bright-yellow sauce rich with the flavors of pork jus, vinegar, wine, and butter. You don't expect this kind of subtlety from an establishment with Superette in the name, but neither do you complain when it arrives, especially with a plate of ziti on the side.

Two desserts we tried ($3.95 each) were both terrific: the hazelnut baci torte had a thick, creamy mocha filling and a dark-chocolate icing on top; the tiramisu was gooey inside and refreshingly light. At the end of the meal, with the check, comes a plate of fruit: watermelon chunks, strawberries, kiwi, cantaloupe.

The convenience-store half of Vinny's is roped off in the evenings and darkened. The restaurant half is straight out of an old Billy Joel song: ceiling painted with grapevines and clouds, walls of brick and mirror, tablecloths that are either red-and-white check or a spiffy pattern of Chianti bottles and garlic heads and chef's hats. A map of Sicily hangs on the back wall.

The place is crowded some nights, quiet others. At one point, for a while, it was just us and the party across the aisle: two silver-haired men in expensive suits, and their wives. In the middle of their meal, one of the men flipped open up a cellular phone and called someone who couldn't make it. Then he leaned toward our table: "Hey, would you guys mind wishing Jerry a happy birthday?"

We didn't know that 20 minutes later they'd be offering us red wine from a magnum of Woodbridge they'd brought. "Happy birthday, Jerry," we all said anyway. It felt pretty good.