Scirocco Mediterranean Grill, 2552 Riva Road, Annapolis, (410) 573-0970. Open every day for lunch and dinner, brunch Sunday. Major credit cards. No-smoking area: yes. Prices: appetizers, $3-$6.50; entrees, $12-$20. ***
Scirocco Mediterranean Grill is a restaurant that's opened in the right place at the right time. Mediterranean food is hotter than hot right now, and I'm not talking spicy. With its grilled foods, seafood, grains, olive oils and great bread, Mediterranean is probably the major trend in food right now.
That's the right time part. As for the right place, this new Annapolis restaurant is located just off Route 97 on Riva Road -- easy for Baltimoreans to get to if they don't mind driving a bit.
Gino Giolitti, owner of La Piccola Roma in Annapolis, has teamed up with Anthony Capuano from O'Leary's, also in Annapolis, to create a new place that should have a wide audience. You can feel comfortable ordering pizza or pasta at Scirocco in your jeans; or you can dress up, spend a lot more money and celebrate a special occasion.
The look of the place is faux Mediterranean in its highest form, with marble busts and distressed finishes, fat pillar candles dripping wax down wrought-iron candlesticks, Greco-Roman columns, a copper-topped bar and lots of whitewashed walls and terra cotta. Each white-clothed and glass-topped table sports a bottle of olive oil and a small pottery bowl holding a couple of lemons. The open kitchen in back reveals a wood-burning grill, rotisserie and stone oven for pizzas.
Fans of La Piccola Roma will expect an Italian restaurant, but the menu actually offers very little strictly Italian food. This is the place to go for grilled seafood, meats and vegetables. There's a representative dish from each of several Mediterranean cuisines, such as Tunisian fish soup, a Middle Eastern combination plate, paella from Spain and moussaka from Greece.
Everything is bountiful here. A busboy brings bread to your table in the largest basket you've ever seen. You decide whether you want focaccia, chewy Tuscan bread or herb rolls -- or all three. All are baked on the premises. (The first two are the best choices; the rolls were doughy and heavy.)
Food is served on enormous white plates dusted with minced parsley. You might start with seviche, in this case thinly sliced, exceptionally fresh raw salmon marinated in lemon with olive oil and herbs. You eat this delicacy on toast made from thin slices of Scirocco's Tuscan bread. The same toast is the base for another starter, panzanella. This isn't the best time of year for fresh tomatoes, but when they're plum tomatoes chopped and tossed with a flavorful vinaigrette, they work very well.
If you want something more substantial, start with a pizza, like the fine white pizza with cheese and no tomatoes, chopped shrimp, mussels, clams, squid and scallops. It had a thin, crisp crust and was fragrant with garlic.
The Tunisian fish soup was pleasant but surprisingly reminiscent of Maryland crab soup, even though it was supposedly spiced with ginger and curry rather than Old Bay.
Next came salads, not as inventive as the rest of the meal. The mix of greens was good and it had an appealing, mustardy vinaigrette, but why use pale winter tomatoes?
Scirocco's specialty is grilled food, and it's very good -- although not as smoky-flavored as you might expect. We tried a whole red snapper (fresher than fresh) and an excellent mixed grill consisting of a filet mignon, a lamb chop and a pork chop. Grilled vegetables and potatoes came with both. Unfortunately the grills were drowned in their delicious sauce of olive oil, lemon, garlic and herbs. The fish, particularly, was overwhelmed by it.
Scirocco's paella is a little different from what you'd get in a Spanish restaurant, but it's every bit as good. The saffron-scented rice was studded generously with shrimp, mussels and clams in their shells, Spanish sausage and strips of grilled chicken.
This is the kind of food that cries out for wine. Scirocco makes it easy for you with a wine list where both the whites and reds are all priced at $18, and you pick what appeals from the elaborate descriptions. If you're more of a connoisseur, look for the list of "premium wines" at the back, most of them costing around $55. (Unfortunately there's nothing much in between.)
We liked the atmosphere at Scirocco. We liked the food. Our waiter drove us crazy. He was that worst of combinations: nice, ** but a Mr. Know-it-all.
I didn't really mind his telling us more than we wanted to know about every dish, but I did mind his correcting my guest's pronunciation of farfalle. (She was right, but that's beside the point.) Especially when he himself referred to "Black Agnes beef" several times. When one of us ordered pizza for a first course, our waiter told us he wouldn't put in our order for the panzanella as well; we'd have too much food. (No gentle suggestion here.) But we want both, we wailed. When I said we were ready to order dessert, he insisted we talk about coffee first.
What a bully.
Desserts, when we finally got them, were very good. Torta
Giolitti, a semi-frozen, citrusy confection, would be my first choice. But if you aren't a little tired of chocolate mousse and tiramisu (which I have to confess I am, after many evenings out at trendy restaurants), you'll find Scirocco does as good a version of each as you'll get anywhere.
Next: Fat Lulu's