Home cooking, Italian Style

A server at Tiago Home Kitchen in Beijing. The restaurant's decor is dominated by a back wall of wooden shelves filled with Italian ingredients. [Photo by Wang Zhuangfei/China Daily]

A savvy new restaurant serves up Mediterranean flavor at a new, convenient mall location, Yang Feiyue finds.

Good Italian food is easy to find in China's big cities at high-end restaurants. Tiago Home Kitchen, however, has found a niche at a medium price level, delivering tasty dishes at Beijing's Indigo mall near the Lido area.

The kitchen's menu doesn't run the gamut of traditional Italian food, but it covers major items. Those dishes available do justice to their prices.

Our recent meal got off to a good start with the carpaccio di salmon affumicato (58 yuan, or $9.30)－thinly cut smoked salmon sprinkled with dill, fresh lemon juice and olive oil.

The wild mushroom salad (48 yuan) came next, with its generous portion of three kinds of mushrooms stir-fried with purple perilla and a hint of chilli powder. On the plate, they were covered with a mixture of lettuce, roquette seed, garden rocket and endive, all dressed with a mix of Italian red-wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. The dish was a delightful mix of sweet and tangy tastes. It's best to stir the warm mushrooms with the chilled vegetables to get the optimum temperature for the palate.

The seafood venere risotto (78 yuan) was steeped in squid ink and blended with fresh white clams and small cuttlefish. Unlike similar dishes at other places, the risotto was light and not greasy. It featured variations in taste and texture, thanks to the addition of the clams and cuttlefish. But I detected a smidgen of sand in the rice, mostly likely from the clams.

The surprise of the night was the Peking duck and spring onion pizza (89 yuan), with its thin, soft and crisp-edged crust and smoky duck meat with mozzarella cheese. The eatery's housemade sweet fermented flour sauce gave the whole thing a luscious feeling. You don't realize how the generous the savory duck topping is until you find there's only meat left in your month to chew on after the crust is gone.