This week’s dinner was at Sorella, the “little sister” (sorella literally means sister) restaurant to Acquerello which we still love (I’ve been going there for more than 20 years…yes, I’m old) and Sorella is positioned as more an any day dining experience compared to the occasion dining experience at Acquerello. We’ve been meaning to eat here for awhile ever since they opened up last December, but so many restaurants to try.

The space is is quite nice…airy ceiling, not too loud, and we had a great front corner window seat which gave us a view of most of the restaurant. Even for the relatively early dinner time (5:45), the place was completely full on a Thursday.

We started with cocktails of course, both of which we enjoyed. We ordered 2 antipasti, the chicory salad and the parmesan budino. Both were flavorful and satisfying.

I had high hopes for the pasta dishes…in fact all of the pasta dishes on the menu looked interesting just based on the ingredient list and description. We went with the tonnarelli with the fort bragg uni and salmon roe and the short rib agnolotti with morels. Sad to say, the pasta dishes were both underseasoned and just didn’t have enough flavor. The agnolotti had some great potential if the sauce had just been reduced more to let the flavors develop and more salt/seasoning. The tonnarelli was very meh. Both dishes looked beautiful though.

For the secondi, we split the liberty duck dish since, one, we knew we were going to be getting pretty full already and, two, we make a lot of king salmon and pork chops at home a lot already so we wanted some variety. The duck and the sauce were decently flavorful.

For dessert, we went with the strawberry cheesecake with honeycomb and malted vanilla gelato. This was quite good. I so rarely have cheesecake (I think of all the dense bricks I’ve had in the past), but this was pleasantly light and almost airy.

Possibly the best part of the meal was the two flights of amari that we had. We had three matching pairs of amari with each pair having a current vintage and an aged vintage from the 70s. It was fascinating to compare the same producer in different vintages and also to compare across the 3 different producers. The Cynar was the most mild and easy to drink. The Petrus had the most flavor, herbaceousness, and bitterness – a bit to overpowering for me in the young version, but very interesting in the vintage version. That was for both of us, our favorite. That left the Ramazotti as our last choice…certainly not a bad one, but we just enjoyed the other two more.

Wine offerings were fine…nothing special. Service was excellent. And the amari was the best selection we’ve seen (they also had 3 other older vintages from 50’s and 60’s, but he didn’t have those in current vintages. We’ll definitely have to come back some time to try those). So all in all, we had a very enjoyable experience even if the menu was ultimately limited. Pricing is typical SF, so it’s not going to be exactly inexpensive.