The Sicilian Butcher is hardly the first restaurant to make a variety of meatballs its centerpiece. Yet, it most likely is the best-decorated of any such restaurants. It treats meatballs much as a build your own burger treats…well…burgers. You pick a meat, you pick a sauce and you pick what the Sicilian Butcher calls a bottom. You can order the meatballs bottomless, but this is highly misleading as they come without a base as opposed to being unlimited. After much consideration, I opted for a bottom.
And I also opted for Tony’s “Dry Aged” Steak Balls, which consist of aged ribeye, roasted garlic, pecorino and parmigiano cheese, onions and herb crumbs. I was told that these meatballs were truly dry and would be best suited for a creamy sauce. So, I went with a pamigiano cream sauce assuming it would complement that same parmigiano in the balls. Then, I got even creamier with creamy polenta as my bottom.
In case you’re wondering, it wasn’t too creamy. In fact, the sauce and the bottom were easily the best parts of this creamy spectacle of Italian cooking. The meatballs themselves, however, fell flat. And it wasn’t just the dry-ness. After eating just one, I had enough of the flavor and after eating all three I was left craving one of the meatballs that one of my companions was eating instead.
I did crush some delicious blueberry cheesecake to wash it all down (you know, because I needed more creaminess) and must say that it was mighty delicious.
Sauce, polenta and cheesecake are wonderful things, but when your thing is meatballs you gotta knock them out of the park. The Sicilian Butcher delivered a ground rule double at best and hoped the rest of the dish would make up for it.