Notice the “Italian Grill” after the name Ciao Bella. Yes, in moving from the Mendenhall Commons shopping center to the Erinway shopping center, now occupying the space once home to Lulu Grill, the restaurant has expanded in every way. It’s larger, it has a complete bar and a lounge area, and the menu includes not only salads, pizzas and pasta dishes, as before, but steaks and chops and seafood. Ciao Bella has become a real restaurant.

Pastas continue to be well-made and tasty, as evidenced by the way we scarfed down the ravioli with roasted red peppers and sausage and the Contadina, penne pasta with basil and tomatoes in a garlic butter sauce with the addition of grilled chicken. Pizzas actually seem better at the new Ciao Bella; the Greek Pizza we tried — garlic, chicken, feta cheese, spinach, olives, tomatoes, red and green peppers and oregano — was delicious, and the crust was crisp and puffy without being cracker-like.

Last night, the “Catch of the Day” was a piece of mahi-mahi simply and perfectly seared with a light dusting of herbs and served with rosemary roasted potatoes and sauteed broccolini. I tried the 14-ounce New York strip steak “Fiorentine.” The beef is marinated in lemon, garlic and olive oil and then topped with tomatoes, wilted spinach and mozzarella cheese. The last item I asked to be omitted, being sensually and philosophically opposed to putting cheese atop steaks and chops; they’re rich enough and fatty enough by themselves. This was not the most tender steak I have ever eaten — it was authentic in the sense that Europeans don’t make a fetish, as Americans do, of buttery tenderness in beef — but it was bursting with rich, meaty flavor and was cooked to medium rare exactly as requested.

The restaurant, which is packed most nights, is at 565 Erin Drive and is open for dinner every night beginning at 5. Call 205-2500.

If you haven’t been on East Brookhaven Circle in a while, you’re in for a big surprise, as we were when we turned left off Poplar last night and were greeted by a new building that looks like a soaring fortress in an Italian hill-town. Boy, that went up fast. The two-story building with the tower in front houses Marciano, the new restaurant started by Mortez Gerani after he sold Marena’s (now Roustica) to Kevin Rains; that change was announced in August.

It takes some getting used to the shape of the long, narrow dining room with the bar at the center, which is what you see when you enter the restaurant. The building is wide, and the dining area stretches across the front.

We enjoyed out first meal at Marciano. The menu emphasizes Mediterranean cuisine with a focus on Italy, and the prices are remarkably fair; appetizers, soups and salads are $5 to $10 and entrees start at $12 for a couple of chicken dishes and go to $22, and that’s for what must be the least expensive rack of lamb in town.

An order of bruschetta — and that’s pronounced “broosketta” not “brooshetta” — brought two slices of grilled bread holding smoked salmon (good), one with tomato and mozzarella (good) and one with a little heap of soft, cooked eggplant (great, and I don’t even like eggplant). Mediterranean lentil soup with sausage was hearty and delicious on a cold night, and a bowl of cioppino, Italian fish stew, was a-brim with shrimp and scallops and pieces of white fish in a rich, tomatoey broth with a thin pasta.

LL went with last night’s special, a rich, flavorful piece of flounder stuffed with seafood served with spaghetti and grilled vegetables. I chose that rack of lamb, and while it didn’t offer the deepest or most complex flavors of which lamb is possible, it was very tasty, tender and meaty; it’s served with excellent roasted potatoes and zucchini and a dark, glossy Marsala sauce.

Needing only one dessert and two spoons, we chose the tartufo, a ball of chocolate wrapped around a zabaglione cream center and covered with a Gianduia chocolate cream.

Marciano has an extensive wine list with decent, though standard, choices in all categories. Considering the cuisine, the restaurant offers an opportunity to create a specialized list of wines from Spain, the south of France and Italy, though someone would have to take the trouble to do that. We enjoyed glasses of the Campo del Mare Vermentino ($9) and Robert Mondavi’s Bordeaux-style blend, Vinetta ($7).

Service was friendly, personable and helpful.

Marciano is at 780 Brookhaven Circle East; you can’t miss it. The restaurant is open for lunch Tuesday through Friday and dinner Tuesday through Sunday. Call 682-1660.

My thanks go to page designer Donna Bauer for coming up with the “Oat Cuisine” headline for my story about oatmeal this morning. She told me yesterday that she had been wanting to use that pun for years, so I’m glad I gave her the opportunity.

Speaking of oatmeal, as LL and I were testing the products mentioned in the story and the sidebar, I couldn’t help noticing how we take different approaches to oatmeal. I like mine with brown sugar or honey and a little milk; she likes hers with salt and butter and a little milk. It takes all kinds, right? She does have far less of a sweet tooth than I do.

And thinking about that issue brought to mind the ritual my father went through when he ate oatmeal many years ago, when I was a child. He would rummage through the kitchen cabinets and drawers looking for any stale confection to crumble into his oatmeal: stale cake or doughnuts or Danish pastries, the last few chocolate chip cookies in the jar, an old brownie — anything sweet and slightly over the hill was grist for the mill (oops, ha-ha) of his oatmeal. Then he would top his creation off with a sliced banana. And he insisted on using skim milk, which to me was like pouring milky-pale water into your cereal. I would sit there appalled in a state of goggle-eyed disgust and then frown wildly like a cadet existentialist.

Ah, family life. As I said, It takes all kinds …

I just returned from lunch at Tugs, the casual restaurant at the River Inn hotel in Harbor Town. There’s also a fine dining restaurtant, Currents.

Tugs, like Gaul, is divided into three parts. There’s a bar directly opposite the entrance. To the right, around a corner, is a smallish dining room, to the left, at a slight angle, is another bar with a few tables. The dining room part is attractive, with windows on two sides and framed photographs of Mississippi River steam boats and barges. Why, though, is there a television suspended high in one corner? Isn’t the TV set in the bar enough?

The menu focuses on typical bar-and-grill fare, mainly appetizers and sandwiches with a modest roster of entrees.

A Caesar salad was pretty standard, though the addition of tiny white anchovies was a nice idea. Gumbo is the all-ingredients-variety, with shrimp, crawfish, chicken, pieces of sausage and okra. Purists may object to this eclectic approach, but it was tasty, needing only a bit more spice to give it heat and pep. Fried oysters felt burdened by too much crisp crust; a delicate touch would have been beneficial.

A giant juicy burger with Swiss cheese, bacon and sauteed mushrooms presented large, meaty flavors and was cooked to medium rare as requested. The only drawback here was that the tomato slices, just taken from the refrigerator, were cold to the touch; let’s serve those things at room temp, please!

Creme brulee was delicious, creamy indeed but with a good, slightly stiff texture and a nicely scorched top. The espresso is good too.

Tugs is open from 11 a.m. until late every day. Call 260-3333. To see menus for Tugs and Currents, visit riverinnmemphis.com.

Hi, readers, I’m going to be off from about 19 minutes from now until Monday, January 7. YES!!!
LL and I will have a quiet holiday. I cook a traditional “English” dinner for us on Christmas Eve — standing rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, roasted potatoes, Brussel sprouts with a Bordeaux red wine with cheese and port to follow — and a little Southern breakfast on Christmas morning, you know, eggs and country ham and red-eye gravy, grits and biscuits, with a bottle of Pol Roger Brut champagne. So much for our traditions. Otherwise, I’m planning on getting a lot of my own writing done, as well as posting to my personal website and blog, and taking lots of walks with the dogs.

It’s been great posting to “Whining & Dining” this year and enlightening, educational, amusing, exasperating and above all fun reading all of your heartfelt responses to my and Jennifer’s ideas and opinions. While I’m off, I’ll keep up with what’s going on on this blog and when it’s appropriate, I’ll send in a response.

Aside from that, I hope everybody has a wonderful, well, whatever you want to call it — Christmas, holiday season, Yuletide and so on. Eat well, drink well (but moderately) and keep it honest.

In our last survey of wine list costs, we focused on a luxury item, the well-known Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label nonvintage champagne, finding that prices in restaurants around town ranged from $70 to $130. And to add two more prices to that roster (at the low and high ends) the VC/YL costs $77 at Sekisui Pacfic Rim and $121 at Capriccio Grill in The Peabody. The second figure is interesting because Capriccio Grill is in The Peabody with Chez Philippe, and Chez Philippe, a far more opulent restaurant, charges $99 for the same champagne.

Anyway, our concern today is a much cheaper and pretty well ubiquitous white wine on area wine lists, the Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc. Say “seafood restaurant” and you’ll probably find the Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc (made from sauvignon blanc grapes) on the list. You can count on this wine to be clean, crisp and fresh, with the snappy acid and slightly spicy and herbal citrus flavors that mean so much to calamari, shrimp and sea bass.

So, here’s our list, drawn from nine local restaurants of diverse aims and geography, stretching from Downtown to Wolfchase. The first price is by-the-glass, the second for a bottle. These figures came from restaurant websites or through telephone calls.

Blue Fin $7.50/$28
Grove Grill $7.75/$30
McEwen’s on Monroe $8.00/$30
Tsunami $8.00/$32
Encore $8.00/$36
J. Alexander’s $9.00/$32
Sekisui Pacific Rim $9.00/$35
River Oaks $9.00/$37
Equestria $10.00/$40

Remember that many factors enter into the determination of prices on a restaurant’s wine list: location, rent, overhead, customer base, style of food and prices on the menu, diners’ expectations (or restaurants’ anticipation of their diners’ expectations) and working the deals with the wholesaler.

What is fine dining?

I ask because there has been some discussion about this category of restaurant — whatever it is — in responses to several posts that Jennifer Biggs and I entered on the blog in the past week or so.

In writing about favorite restaurants, FIG said, “Sad to say, not any of the fine dining restaurants, very disappointing.”

When I asked FIG to elaborate about “fine dining” in Memphis, this was part of the response: “not … necessarily bad, just disappointing. They tend to fall into two categories here, (1) misguided hodgepodge of too busy plates with numerous ingredients that are confused as being creative … And (2) pseudo upscale Southern trying to reinterpret Southern cuisine by rehashing tired old ideas.”

Ouch!

And on the post about the pricing of Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label, Chris Henderson, general manager of Equestria (where service is excellent), said this about fine dining in our area: " ... there is no fine dining in Memphis. No one measures up to the standard of service that our parents and grandparents once experienced. I would say that there are only a handful (of fine dining restaurants) left in the U.S."

Ouch, again! You can bet that the owners, chefs and managers of establishments like Chez Philippe and Erling Jensen would disagree with both of these viewpoints.

Perhaps we need to ascertain what fine dining really is.

Does a fine dining restaurant have to have white cloths and napkins on the tables and great china and utensils and glassware? Does fine dining imply an atmosphere of cool, subtle elegance or unabashed luxury? Do we know we’re in a fine dining establishment when we open the menu and see appetizer prices going up to $20 and main courses going up to $40 or more? Does the idea of fine dining imply a particular type of food that employs the best, if not luxury ingredients, creatively conceived and artfully and beautifully arranged? With emphasis, of course, on classic French cuisine? Or can fine dining be “American” or “fusion,” whatever those terms mean?

In a fine dining restaurant, does the waiter say, “Hi, my name is Steve and I’ll be taking care of you guys tonight”? Or do we count on waiters who exercise courtesy, discretion, helpfulness, efficiency and a certain amount of intuition, if not actual clairvoyance? Who are there without seeming to be there?

Has the seemingly relentless tide toward the casualization of American life and culture ruined everything that would contribute to fine dining? Is the “casually elegant” tier in restaurant dining merely a way of getting out of dressing up a little? (Jacket, yes; baseball cap, no.)

Taking the positive aspects and implications (or the negative) of the questions I have posed here, does Memphis (and the area) truly not have restaurants that qualify as "fine"? Does anybody care?

Come on, "fine dining" patrons, restaurant owners, chefs and managers and all you readers who wouldn't pay more than $25 for a meal, including drink, tax and tip, let us hear from you.

Photo credits:
1. The elegant table setting is from jupiterimages.com.
2. Daniel Boulud’s tuna tartare is from nibble.com.
3. This incredibly romantic corner of Michel Guerard’s restaurant is from vanin.be.
4. This dish, from Cafe Toulouse of Le Bernardin, is from shopping.beloblog.com.

One of those days again, when eight hours at work feel like 327 hours, and of course it doesn’t help that the milieu in the Bluff City has been fraught with gloom, so we trek over to The Belmont, about eight minutes from the house, for a burger. And we get a perfect parking place! Right by the back door! Good omen! The interior of the place is so gaudily lit up with Christmas lights, I mean a million tiny lights, at least, that it’s like sitting inside a Christmas tree, say the one at Rockefeller Center. We don’t even need menus. LL orders a burger, medium rare, with cheddar cheese and fries. I order a burger, medium rare, with Swiss cheese and bacon; LL does a double-take and gasps, and the waiter says, “What’s wrong? Did you mean to order bacon on your burger?” And LL says, “No, I just can believe that he ordered bacon.” And I got onion rings.

I’ve always loved the burgers at The Belmont. I love the quality of the meat and the almost rectangular soft, but slightly chewy French roll the burger comes on. I love it that this kitchen has never been afraid to cook a burger exactly to medium rare because that’s what the customer wants. This is one juicy, meaty, flavorful burger, and the Swiss cheese and bacon, oh, and the little paper container of cole slaw which is never quite enough but adds some zip and crunch — well, I’m sorry, but I’m about to go out on a limb here and say that this is, OK, not THE best but certainly among the top three or four burgers in town. It’s individually styled but not eccentric; it creates its own tradition of greatness without losing sight of the honorable American heritage of burgers.

The Belmont was packed last night: couples young and middle-aged and elderly; families with children; groups of friends; a few solitary diners eating at the bar. A gentle hubbub of conversation over the eclectic range of music. A sense of complete, comfortable unchangingness in the heart of Old East Memphis. Isn’t that the definition of a favorite place?

Looking at some local restaurant wine lists online, I couldn’t help noticing this range of prices for Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label Brut, the non-vintage French champagne that’s one of the most highly visible and relentlessly marketed brands in the world.

Ready?

Umai ……………….. $70
Encore ………………$80
Felicia Suzanne’s …..$85
The Grove Grill ……..$95
Erling Jensen ……….$96
River Oaks ………….$98
Chez Philippe ……… $99
Interim ……………..$112
The Majestic ………$113
Circa ……………….$130

That’s right, readers, there’s a difference of $60 between the lowest and the highest prices of Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label on these 10 wine lists, this for a champagne that retails usually for $35 to $45. Of course the restaurants don’t pay the retail price; they pay wholesale. Yes, I know, the price in the restaurant includes the high Tennessee sales tax on wine as well as the city tax, but still, if Umai, a small establishment that can’t move a lot of the stuff, can charge $70, it means that places charging over, say, $90 are making a killing. And $130!!!!! Does the word “unconscionable” mean anything to you? You pays yer money and you takes yer choice.

When I reviewed Umai at the end of March, I gave it two stars, based mainly on the fact that service was amateurish and erratic, that it took eons to get dishes out of the small, open kitchen and that much about the French-Japanese fusion restaurant seemed provisional. The food, however, was close to excellent.

Last night’s meal proved that service is much better — well-known waiter Patrick McNamara, formerly of Wally Joe, now presides at Umai — the food still takes a while to get to the table but not hours, and the food itself is better than ever. In fact, throughout our dinner, there wasn’t a single misstep. Presentations are artful, beautifully detailed, without being precious or pretentious; flavors are married in series of often playful comparisons and contrasts, the primary emphasis being on purity and intensity. Sushi and sashimi are now available at Umai, but we stuck with the regular menu.

Dinner began with a tasty tuna salad-kimchi amuse-bouche and continued with appetizers of black mussels and the fish Grenobloise. The mussels are flash roasted and then steamed in and served in a kimchi-miso broth and accompanied by thin triangles of toasted bread. This is a great mussels preparations. The mussels are good size and deeply flavorful, as is the broth, which brings an earthy exotic flavor. The Grenobloise is an unusual dish for a restaurant that employs so many Japanese themes and ingredients; this preparation is pure French bistro, two small filets of (in this case) flounder, crusted with panko crumbs and perfecty fried, served on dense, glossy mashed potatoes with a caper-butter sauce.

LL ordered the roasted hijiki seaweed salad, a dish of striking intensity and power. As you can see in the photograph above (which she took), the salad is also beautiful to look at, flecked with sesame seeds, topped with thin lemon slices and adorned with a hem of English peas. I had the soup du jour, a generous portion of ginger and sweet potato soup (no cream) with exquisite balance between the ginger and the sweet potato. (That’s the other image, which I took.)

Since we were drinking red wine (the Hewitson “Miss Harry” 2005), we chose red meat entrees. LL had the “Drunken Duck,” slices of medium rare duck breast that had been marinated for 48 hours and then seared. These are served on a bed of creamed potatoes with steamed choi sum (in the bok choi family) and the dark mahogany “drunken duck” sauce. I’ll unlimber the word “intensity” again at this moment to say that the duck is one of the most emphatically rich, deeply flavorful and intense dishes, I mean sublimely delicious, I have ever encountered, and we made little inroad, though we took home what we couldn’t eat.

Almost that intense is the sirloin strip encrusted with guajillo (a chile pepper common to Mexico) and chickory coffee, grilled to the requested medium rare — actual medium rare — and served with a tasty and exotic “sour” fried rice and a Japanese curry veal au jus. Lord have mercy! We took a lot of that home too.

McNamara convinced us to try one dessert, the “homemade pie du jour,” last night being an apple and apricot tart that was almost more savory than sweet.

When people talk about bargain dining, Umai should be at the top of the list. Appetizers are $7 to $13, entrees are $17 to $20. The short but well-chosen wine list is equally cost-conscious, the white wines ranging from $20 to $29, the reds from $16 to $35.

The restaurant still feels a bit provisional in furnishings and comfort-level — it’s cold in fall and winter — but service is thoughtfully Old School and the food, as I think I’ve indicated here, is superb.

Umai is at 2015 Madison. It’s open for lunch Wednesday through Friday, dinner Wednesday through Saturday and for Sunday brunch. Call 405-4241.