The gleaming open kitchen of Amore Pasta's new downtown location. GRAHAM HICKS/EDMONTON SUNEdmonton

Amore Pasta Downtown
10235 – 101 St.  (Sutton Place Hotel lobby – north end)
780-488-421-4450

No reservations
Delivery: Skipthedishes.com, DoorDash.com, Foodora.ca

8 a.m. to 9 p.m. (Sat. and Sun. 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.)

Dinner for two excluding tip, taxes or beverages: Basic, $22; loaded $42

Food:  4 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 4 of 5 Suns
Service: 4 of 5 Suns

By GRAHAM HICKS

The “new” Edmonton food scene is fast upon us.

A few steps backwards: It’s retroactive – back to basics like pizza, hamburgers and pasta.  It’s fresher and healthier than fast food, but still about high-volume and speed. There’s no sense of occasion.

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A few steps forwards: It’s quality food, not fast-food junk. It’s about a third less-expensive then full-service restaurants. It’s consistent, fast, casual but not crummy. The decors are designer-quality.

The Crudo family, now with five eateries, have perfected the art of “quality fast food” at their brand-new, downtown, quick-service Amore Pasta.

The Crudos — brothers Cristo and Nick with dad Giuseppe and their families — have become synonymous with excellent Italian taverna food. Their first hole-in-the-wall Café Amore was so successful it precipitated a move to the much bigger and equally popular Café Amore Bistro. The family then filled a gaping seafood restaurant gap with the opening of their highly regarded Black Pearl Seafood Restaurant.

Two years ago, they opened the  low-key Amore Pasta Terwillegar, essential a daytime pasta bar/cafeteria. It was a strange one – why a small suburban pasta joint, with so much else on the go?

Now it makes sense. The Terwillegar Amore Pasta was a laboratory, a replicative prototype, creating and perfecting the multiple systems needed to deliver top-quality Amore pasta dishes within minutes of ordering.

Amore Pasta Downtown — just off the north lobby of the Sutton Place Hotel, across the hall from the Rose & Crown – is as modern as modern can be, all gleaming steel, floor-to-ceiling windows, cherry red and white colours, seating at super-white tables that fill up quickly at lunches and pre-Oiler games.

The menu is limited but fun and delicious … pasta, pasta, pasta, nine different dishes all at $14 — or a Subway-ish point-and-pick to create your own pasta dish. Add four or five  mac & cheese variations, two salads, a few desserts, soup of the day, one red wine, one white, cute little espresso and liquor bars, omelettes and eggs for breakfast – bango, one quick-service resto.

Ordering is fun.  You work your way down a counter-service line-up, place your order and watch it cook before your eyes over a series of burners. Within minutes, the piping-hot pasta is waiting for you at the  line-up’s end point, the pick-up counter.

Amore’s pastas are finished right in front of the customers’ eyes. Graham Hicks/Edmonton Sun Edmonton

Truly these are delicious pastas, as are the “snacks” that I’ve never seen before – tightly wrapped mac & cheese or lasagna bits rolled into golf-ball-sized spheres, deep-fried inside aranchini batter, all hot and gooey and crunchy.

Lasanga bits (left) and mac & cheese balls are something new.

The mac & cheese variations are splendidly hot, as fresh as fresh can be, and generous to a fault. My spicy vongole (clam) linguine pasta, with its fresh-off-the-burner cheese and seafood,  was a perfect counterpoint to a cold winter’s day.

Within minutes of ordering, Amore Pasta’s spicy vongole (baby clam) pasta is ready to eat.

My only quibble was our tiramisu dessert.. While the tiramisu was tasty, it came in an ugly clear-plastic cafeteria container … and it was a tiny bit stale. In short, nothing close to the always-fresh Café Amore or Black Pearl desserts. On this particular product, quality control had broken down between the Crudos’ new central commissary and Amore Pasta Downtown.

While tasty, the taramisu was not fresh and unappetizingly packaged.

It looks like expansion of the Amore Pasta concept has been thoroughly researched: Limited selections of pasta dishes, ready within minutes of ordering, inexpensive, hot, and as good, if not better, than the pasta dishes offered throughout the city from other top Italian restaurants at cheaper prices.

Now if they could ensure the tiramisu trays were fresher  ….

Dining out notes

• Ben Staley – whose former Alta Room was one of Air Canada’s En Route Magazine’s Top 10 New Restaurants in 2017 – will shortly open Yarrow with the same fixed menu and a determination not to use anything – spices, sweets, fruits – not grown or foraged in Western Canada.

• Some say the famous Peters’ Drive-In burgers have slipped since the legendary Calgary burger joint expanded to Red Deer’s Gasoline Alley. We will soon see. A third Peters’ Drive-In will be opening in Edmonton on Calgary Trail.

• Old Strathcona’s Holy Roller is closed for renovations and a menu-makeover, likely re-opening in early spring. Also under-going a menu change is Holy Roller’s sister restaurant two doors down, the upstairs Have Mercy.