Find friendly vibe at Roman Cucina

Where to find good Italian food in South Orange County? (Specifically the Saddleback Valley area). That is what someone mentioned back in October so consider this a first step in the search for Italian dining destinations in South Orange County. By all means, this is a call to send in your favorite places and the reason (s) why. Enjoy! Roman Cucina Italiana in Laguna Hills is a lively when patrons gather, as they did during our stay Thursday night. Pictures fill the brick walls like tile, even in the bathrooms. Glow from chandeliers gently meaders through the dining room, with both booths and tables, and bar. The menu is pretty straight forward – divided into sandwiches, salads, pastas, antipasti, lasagna, pizzas and calzones. Pasta choices include a side house salad with a red wine vinaigrette and your selection of style (penne, spaghetti or fettucine). The sausage mozzarella ($13.95) emerges with two Italian sausage links atop penne in red sauce with soft, sweet ricotta spheres in the middle. Sausage is flavorful with fennel seed and has some heat. The pasta is cooked ideally and the red sauce is full of tomato flavor. The smooth ricotta is airy, pillowy. The salad has appealing crunch from sliced cucumbers and romaine chunks and, for me, is overdressed. The well-balanced, salty red wine vinaigrette is made in-house. Shredded parmesan tops the salad. 

Among the antipasti are mushrooms sauteed with olive oil and a white wine lemon garlic sauce ($8.95) and steak milanese, a lightly-breaded thin cutlet of top round served with red sauce and lemon wedge ($7.95). You can get this on pasta or salad or in a sandwich. Pasta offerings also include shrimp scampi, served in a lemon-garlic sauce ($16.95) and ala checca, olive oil, garlic and Roma tomatoes ($12.95). Televisions propped on white-brick walls show a college basketball game and there appears to be ample conversation flowing throughout the restaurant, one of four in a chain owned by brothers David and Giovanni Roman. Our server is friendly and offers fresh cracked black pepper with the salad and crushed red pepper and parmesan with the pasta. We linger for two hours, 45 minutes, but our server tells us to take our time. Despite a steady stream of customers coming through the door, we sit and talk at a restaurant that brings friendliness with your meal.

Roman Cucina Italiana

25214 Cabot Road
Laguna Hills, CA 92653
P. (949) 380-4228

Open seven days a week at 5 p.m.

A Sweet Start to the New Year

 

While my breakfast regimen is deeply ingrained, New Year’s Day, at least the last two years, have offered the opportunity to chart a deviant course for the morning. Dad has the day off, the Rose Parade is on television and it makes the new year something to look forward to. This New Year’s Day fell on a Thursday, a day usually observed for oatmeal. But oatmeal was replaced by a yeasty, sweet cinnamon roll. For the last two years, my family opened the year with cinnamon rolls emerging from the oven in all their cooked sugar and doughy goodness. Last year’s recipe came from Bon Appetit. It was Saveur’s time to shine this year with the cream cheese cinnamon rolls with a buttermilk frosting.  The recipe calls for two sticks of butter for eight rolls, but I used less to lighten it up a tad.

Making cinnamon rolls require some work, but most of the work can be done a day ahead. The work started New Year’s Eve.  I ate breakfast and had the kitchen all to myself. The recipe calls for using a dough hook, but I used a paddle attachment. The dough didn’t break away from the sides as the paddle turned, but it still released with some dough remaining on the insides of the bowl. Then let the dough rise. 

Later that day, the rolling pin emerges from its drawer. Flour spreads across the counter. For the most part, the dough, which contains a thin  layer of cream cheese, cooperates through folding and rolling out into a rectangle.  Perhaps it knew it would receive a sheet of brown and granulated sugars, cinnamon, cloves, chopped pecans and walnuts and maple syrup. 

Pat the filling into the dough, roll it up into a cylinder, then slice it into eight pieces. Place the pieces into a 9-by-13-inch baking dish, cover with plastic wrap and stick in the refrigerator overnight.

Then all that’s left for the morning is to mix some buttermilk with powdered sugar for the frosting, bake the rolls, brush with melted butter then spoon on that frosting. 

When baked, the filling melts and oozes from the curls of dough. Gooey browned sugar coats the bottom. One word of advice: place a piece of parchment on the bottom of the pan. Otherwise, you’ll have a mess of hardened sugar.

But enjoy these delicious treats. Bite through the tender dough, curled with a gooey, grainy, sugared-filling.  A jolt of sweetness plays within the mouth. I sit, with a cup of coffee, glass of orange juice and bowl of Cheerios at a morning leisure. I pull out the Orange County Register and to the Life * Food section. I read about the health benefits of certain vegetables like cauliflower and onions.

Don’t know about the health benefits of a cinnamon roll, but the taste payoff is well worth it.  And that is a New Year’s tradition worth holding on to.