LadolceVT: Familiar Italian flair

By Randal Smathers

This one’s an old shoe. No, make that the pair of Italian-made woven leather shoes that finally wore out last year but that I just can’t throw away.

Before I dig myself too deep, maybe I need to explain that I loved those shoes. We’re talking the comfort, style, little Italian flair and familiarity of the shoes, not their eventual demise as old, smelly and out at both heels.

The shoe in question is Sabby’s on Center Street in Rutland.

Let’s run down the list …

Comfort: Along with The Sandwich Shoppe, it is one of the standbys of downtown. It’s a safe bet to recommend to an out-of-towner looking for an unpretentious spot for lunch or dinner. You can order anything on Sabby’s menu and get a tasty meal at a good price. Service is friendly and gets you in and out with a minimum of fuss and bother.

Style: OK, I’m biased from my previous life as a sportswriter, but Sabby’s is what I want my man cave to look like … and yes, that does include 10 beers on tap and having table service. Now that I’m happily married, I feel obliged to mention that my ideal man cave no longer includes Hooters girls. Necessarily.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Sabby’s, it’s got the sports bar thing going downstairs: wooden walls covered in framed sports photos ranging from local high schools through Boston’s pro teams. It’s got lots of TVs but you can also sit in the booths and not have a screen the only thing in sight, and there’s always the dining room upstairs - which seems to be used primarily for functions these days - and sidewalk seating during downtown special events.

The Italian flair: Officially it’s Sabby’s Pasta House and Sports Lounge, so there’s definitely an Italian theme, but it has branched out to include a wide selection of sandwiches, salads and bar foods. The daily specials in particular tend to vary from what you might expect from a restaurant with placemats featuring a map provided by the Italian Tourist Bureau.

On recent visits, I had a perfectly serviceable pollo con arroz complete with a house-made salsa fresca, rice and corn and Tex-Mex-influenced spice rub, disguised on the menu with an Italian name, and a jambalaya served in a bread bowl. The jambalaya was a rare miss from the kitchen of Clarke Congdon, winner of Rutland’s inaugural Iron Chef competition, lacking most of the fire I expect in Cajun cookery.

Generally, the specials are up to the standards of the rest of the menu, so those of us who work around the corner don’t run out of new choices worth exploring.

Familiarity: It doesn’t matter what mood you’re in; you’re liable to find something you feel like from the extensive menu. The baked pasta dishes are as good as you would expect from a pasta house; the sandwiches better.

It seems like everybody in town makes a good Reuben and Sabby’s is no exception, and the cheese steaks have gotten raves from friends who have tried them.

The menu also includes a healthy selection of salads. As with any good salad list, it includes at least one with bacon, so we carnivores can pretend to eat healthy without actually doing so. In Sabby’s case, that’s The Wedge, comprising bacon, bleu cheese dressing and red onion on a chunk of romaine.

They feature what they call the roasted salads: Roasted peppers and pine nuts with basil over fresh greens and your choice of grilled meats, shrimp or portobellos. It’s an excellent salad, but the sweet balsamic vinaigrette is a love-it-or-hate-it thing, so order it on the side until you decide which side you’re on.

I sort of glossed over the Italian specialties, but you shouldn’t. Fair warning: The dinner portions are enormous. The soups are always good, from the minestrone to the French onion or the soup of the day.

What else? Oh yeah, the shoes. They remain the only pair of gen-u-wine Italian shoes I ever bought. They were a little extravagant, but when my last pair blew a sole on a vacation, I dropped a few extra Deutsche marks on them. (I got them in a discount store, which avoided me having to look up “Do you have these in a 39?” in a German/English dictionary. It also meant I didn’t have to find a bookstore to buy a German-English dictionary. Or figure out that an 81/2 is a 39 in European sizes. Ignorance, while bliss, can also be a little pricey, but after “Eine grosses bier, bitte,” and “Schnitzel mit spatzel, bitte,” what else should you really have to know to spend a week in Germany?)

They were made of fine strips of leather woven together and I expected them to fall apart after a season. They were insanely comfortable on hot days, light as my old track spikes and still lasted for a decade of almost-daily summer wear before I finally had to retire them. Sigh.

Oh well. It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of two little shoes don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. And we’ll always have Sabby’s.

Sabby’s Pasta House and Sports Lounge; 33 Center St., Rutland VT 05701; (802) 773-4342; www.sabbys.com; handicap accessible; credit cards accepted. Hours 11 a.m. to midnight, Monday to Saturday; dinner service 5 to 10 p.m. with bar food until 11 on weekends. Check for special Sunday hours when the Paramount Theater has a show, and the bar may close on hour early or stay open an extra hour depending on business. Entrée prices from $7.50 to $17.