Email this page  Print this page  Feed

Subscribe to Rhode Island Monthly : Rhode Island Monthly Dining Out

Homeward Bound

Portuguese comfort food with delicious old-school appeal trumps even its eye-catching industrial chic setting.

Photography by Angel Tucker

Rosinha's Restaurant

999 Main Street, Pawtucket, 721-0770. Open for lunch and dinner daily. Reservations accepted. Wheelchair accessible. Street parking. Cuisine Portuguese Sunday dinner. Capacity About two hundred. Vibe Mama gets down in a municipal loft space. Price Appetizers $4–$8.95, entrees $12.95–$22.95. Karen’s picks Sauteed chourico, arroz de marisco, steak Rosinha and a dish of the daily mousse. Key Fair Good Very Good Excellent Half-star

 I’ve been waiting thirty-five minutes for an appetizer of garlic shrimp. And yet I’m still pretty happy. Happy that, in a state where ocean views get all the accolades, history and heritage still manage to grab the limelight on occasion. Exhibit A: Rosinha’s Restaurant, an amiable amalgam of Portuguese culture and turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture that recently opened in a street-front section of Hope Artiste Village. Renovated mill buildings may have lost their novelty over the past few years, but the astounding scope of this 650,000-square-foot structure still manages to impress with its industrial design and sprawling space. Fourteen-foot ceilings can dominate even Rosinha’s expansive interior with little effort, but competition is fierce, as structural columns, whitewashed brick walls and a quadruplet of glass chandeliers suggest loft-style weddings even to the devoutly single. And yet, beneath the striking appearance lies a picture of sun-drenched Portuguese domesticity, ready to serve couples and large family gatherings.

The furniture, an assortment of dining room tables, upholstered chairs and banquet seating, reveals a philosophy that surpasses casual without being too formal. Another sign? The bar—where servers and visitors often sit together discussing local news—doles out $1 sodas and glasses of $6 house wine. Nearly all of the two dozen wines by the bottle fall under $30, and while they may not be the most mature varieties, most won’t offend.

Though the lunch menu is decidedly casual and strongly American (hot dogs and hamburgers sidle up next to seafood omelets), Rosinha’s dinner menu is an exuberant display of Portuguese and Cape Verdean cuisine. The prices aren’t particularly low (entrees hover around $18), but the owners, Rosa and Carlos Almeida, are dead set on proving just how much diners can eat when they feel at home.

Deconstruct the price per ounce and the restaurant may actually be writing you a check. Portions also account for my reticence to complain about the garlic shrimp (camarao com alho, $8.95). When it finally did arrive, we wondered if there were no more shrimp left in the ocean; we counted sixteen tails, in addition to the loaf of garlic-laden bread and plateful of tomato-tinged scampi sauce.

Many of the appetizers are big enough to be entrees, including the chourico frito ($7.95), a platter of pan-fried chourico served in links or sauteed with peppers, onions and olives. Sauteing generally indicates the more successful dishes—as with a mound of cilantro-tossed mushrooms—though deep-frying is com-mon if not entirely appealing. Various starters, from shrimp and cod cakes to mushroom caps and calamari, are all fried. The salt is as noticeable as the coating, and a bed of mixed greens is a slightly anemic pairing.

The real draw at Rosinha’s, however, is not the sheer size of the dishes but what’s covering them: sauce. Sauce that complements protein (or veils it, if need be), enlivens vegetables and begs to be lapped up with bread. “What do you call a person who really excels at sauces?” one companion asked me and, with barely time for a response, a small smile fell across his face as he muttered (to himself?), “Mom.” Not too far from the truth actually, for a number of cultures. Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Italian...in which country does sauce not make the dish?

There are some relatively exotic sauces that remind diners of Portugal’s far-reaching geographic influences. Butterflied shrimp in mild curry references the Portuguese merchants in Goa, India, while seared salmon with mango, papaya and lime hint at the rich African traditions in Cape Verde that eventually migrated west to the Caribbean. But it’s the house steaks that tout the most compelling taste of liquid Portugal. Bife a cortador (butcher’s cut steak, $17.95) and bife a Rosinha (steak Rosinha, $17.95) are both in “cream sauces” though they’re driven more by wine and vinegar. The former is also full of heady black pepper that goes undetected until several bites in. Both are served with a mound of batata frita, sliced and fried potatoes, whose sole purpose is to soak up a tangy sauce that tastes like the world’s most elevated and covetous version of A1 steak sauce. Steak Rosinha also comes with a fried egg on top, serving the dual purpose of cutting the acidity of the vinegar and asserting the excess of a three-pound plate of food.

The steaks themselves are certainly not the appeal here as they’re tough cuts with a lot of sinew and even more chew. It reminded me of a night out during which a friend gave her $50 steakhouse prime sirloin the evil eye and said, “My mother never cooked a tender steak in her life, and this soft red flesh seems entirely wrong to me.” These tougher cuts do carry a certain level of rusticity that shows up only in restaurants trying to capture culture rather than create it. Even the server assumed I wanted my steak “well done, right?” Uh—no, not at all. But a red center doesn’t always make sense for a cut that puts up a pretty good fight, even with a steak knife.

The most expensive dish on the menu is arroz de marisco ($22.95) which, translated as “seafood rice,” is a bit like calling RISD an after-school arts program. A two-quart aluminum pot overflows with garlic seasoned rice and a surfeit of seafood that includes mussels, squid, shrimp, clams and nearly a whole lobster (half the body and both claws). The rice was still slightly wet, but the seafood remained tender once it was shelled. Rosinha’s inexperience was apparent in response to the dish. Its most amiable servers routinely forgot lobster crackers, napkins and beverages, but that may be a byproduct of the restaurant’s infancy. The thirty-five-minute shrimp was cut down to fifteen the following week, and the desire to please is evident even if all the kinks haven't been worked out yet.

Desserts are still in development. Carrot cake is brought in though the kitchen produces a different mousse nightly, and the variety, an assortment of tropical fruits or chocolate, is consistently airy and worthwhile. Local musicians also fill the air with Cape Verdean and other interludes so dessert does have the advantage of melody—another compelling reason to spend an evening in this home away from home.