Italy doesn’t just speak to me; it calls to me like a Siren. So when I heard there was a new Italian restaurant in town, I sped down the Anthony Henday to the newly opened Vivo like Mario Andretti to the finish line.

Vivo is located in the corner of a Hawkstone Plaza’s parking lot at 18348 Lessard Road. Devoid of indicators of anything Italian or anything that says restaurant, you might mistake it for something other than a restaurant. Sure, the sign above the door says “VIVO”, but what exactly is a vivo?

In Italian, vivo means “live”. And we all know that Italians love to live life to the fullest – especially when it comes to food and drink.

The interior is another story. Vivo is all about the mod milieu. Dark wood, silver and black accents with some high-end light fixtures results in the right amount of bada bing.

The birth of Vivo (in a nutshell): some of the partners and wait staff worked together for many years at the south side Keg. One day they decided to leave and start up their own place. Vivo is the result. Good friends, good food, good times…sounds like a good recipe for a restaurant. So, on to the food:

Vivo offers family-style dining meaning all the plates are meant to be shared. One dish from the antipasti selection will feed two for sure, or four if you want to really stretch it. To follow the antipasti, diners are encouraged to select a dish from the primi selection. By dining this way, a pasta or risotto dish is enough to satisfy four and the secondi (entrees) can be shared by two.

The server made it known that Vivo uses local products like Gull Valley Greenhouse tomatoes, but other than that, was hard pressed to give us names of other local producers they support. We were informed that the beef is Alberta beef, but with some pointed probing, we were finally told that the meat comes from Centennial Foods – a large food supplier who procures commodity proteins. When we asked the restaurant’s stance on supporting small, local producers who raise cattle free of antibiotics and hormones, the response was that consistency and price are the reasons Vivo chooses Centennial over someone like, say, Spring Creek Ranch (our server brought up SCR, not us) citing that SCR costs “three times as much.” Naturally, that statement made me wonder how it’s possible then that retailers (chain and privately owned) from Edmonton to Calgary, from Dawson Creek to Vancouver and Vancouver Island, continue to sell SCR beef, and why over 35 Edmonton restaurants in varying degrees of size and stature (from Culina and the Hotel MacDonald, to Mrkt and even little ol’ Filistix) and over 20 restaurants in Calgary including the highly esteemed Charcut to a mom-and-pop pizza joint feature it on their menus. Something didn’t add up.

We started off with the bruschetta and the mollusco (clams). The clams came perfectly steamed and in a delicate broth of prosecco and fennel. The abundant fennel shavings, thankfully, weren’t overpowering as fennel can sometimes be.

The bruschetta however, missed the mark. Instead of manageable two-bite crostini, these were huge slices of grilled bread and heaped with toppings of tomato, cannellini beans and roasted peppers with goat cheese.

The voice of Gordon Ramsay boomed in my head as I looked at the burnt crostini. I imagined him screaming and throwing bruschetta everywhere, “How can you let this go out of the kitchen!?” To make things worse, the tomato bruschetta was a textural disappointment as well. It had that “I’ve been sitting in the fridge all night” look and feel to it. The tomato dice—which should’ve been noticeably individual— was mush, and the salt content overpowering to the point of making our tongues sizzle. The roasted pepper and goat cheese, although promising in theory, fought with each other in flavour. The goat cheese was more goat than cheese if you know what I mean. But the cannellini bruschetta was delicious with the right combination of garlic, creamy beans and pancetta. A generous glug of olive oil to finish it off helped make this one the saving grace of of the three.

Our server spouted the glories of the fettuccine Alfredo like Romeo mooning over Juliet’s beauty. Home made pasta, a blend of four cheeses, sauteed garlic in olive oil …he guaranteed it to be the best fettuccine Alfredo we’d ever taste. It came close. The mozzarella di bufala (soft Italian cheese made from water buffalo milk) could’ve been blended in more. As it was, the big globs were a bit hard to swallow but overall, this was a fine plate of pasta.

Wanting to taste a bit of everything, we ordered the arrosto misto, a platter of lamb, sausage, chicken cacciatore and Bistecca Fiorentina, and a side of roasted potatoes. The size of the platter was impressive as the server struggled to place it on our table. This particular platter costs $120 but remember, that’s good for four people.

Getting down to the nuts and bolts of it all: The lamb chops were tender with a lovely flavour and served very rare. Anyone with an aversion to blood might have a problem with this one.

The sausage: locally made (nice touch), unfortunately heavy on the salt, again. That’s them in the top right corner, under a pile of fennel shavings.

The chicken cacciatore: “One of these things just doesn’t belong…” Visually, it wrecked the whole package. They brine it, and that’s okay, but the end result was an anemic looking piece of meat accompanied by a cacciatore sauce that begged for somebody’s Nonna to come to the rescue.

The Bistecca Fiorentina: If you’ve ever traveled to Italy, then you’ll probably be familiar with Bistecca alla Fiorentina. The name means “Florentine Steak”, and true Bistecca alla Fiorentina is made from the meat of the offspring (preferably under two years of age) of a Chianina bull, a breed of cattle raised in Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio for over 2000 years. Although many restaurants in Italy now use Argentinean beef for this dish, a true-to-their-roots Tuscan ristorante will serve Chianina meat. If you’re fortunate enough to have one done by a Tuscan who knows how, and who appreciates the amazing characteristics of this meat, you will come as close to tasting heaven as humanly possible. I still drool thinking of the one I had in Florence.

When I asked the manager about the origins of Bistecca alla Fiorentina and of it being a specific breed of Italian bovine, he shook his head and said that no, he didn’t think so. Damn. I had hoped—just a little.

Now, while the meat was tender and salted nicely, like the lamb, it too was extremely rare. I’m not one to shy away from rare meat, but again the bloody juices combined with those of the lamb and the cacciatore sauce resulted in one hot mess. The fingerling potatoes, all nine of them, halved and roasted with rosemary were, in the words of Simon Cowell, “totally forgettable” and at $14, they shouldn’t have been.

I have hope, still, that Vivo will find its groove but for now, I’ll give my dining dollars to restaurants that support small, local producers and have the proof to back it up, and who at the very least, if serving Italian food, can provide the history of whence it came.

My CBC Edmonton AM review of Vivo can be heard here.