Luci Ancora – St. Paul, MN

Our dinner plans fell through for the night, so we hopped on line and found a really good sounding Italian place. And since I know that it angers M.Giant and Trash when I go to St. Paul, Luci Ancora was perfect. We got reservations since sometimes Sunday nights can be busy around dinner.

We got there a tad early, but the hostess gave us menus and asked if wanted drinks. We scoured the menu for a bit and got seated shortly after that. The inside is really nice, although a bit smaller than I expected. But the fact that there were large parties (one was a group of 50+ people at three long tables), made it seem like it was packed and really loud. The waitress ran through the specials and took our orders. EyeHeartPizza went with the Caesar Salad and the Ravioli con Napoletana, and I decided on the Risotto con Fagiano and the Agnello Due Volte (lamb).

The Caesar salad was a decent salad, although it’s difficult to do something flashy with a Caesar salad. It was fine though. The risotto that I got was really fantastic. It was Arborio rice with braised pheasant and butternut squash. It was almost like a super thick soup, and really tasty. The pieces of pheasant were really flavorful. I’d recommend this dish to just about anyone.

The second course came out and I got a piece of EyeHeartPizza’s ravioli. It was good but not fantastic. Like EyeHeartPizza said, the ravioli part was really good, but the sauce wasn’t great. Still good overall. The lamb was absolutely fantastic. It was three lamb chops and then also braised shank sort of chopped up and in jus, and it came with saffron whipped potatoes. The chops were awesome and the shank pieces were super tender. The potatoes were an excellent complement to both lamb flavors. I finally got a dish better than EyeHeartPizza.

Since the food was fantastic, EyeHeartPizza decided she needed dessert. There were a couple of things that sounded good, but since I had no say in the decision, we ended up with blueberry and apricot cheesecake. It was delicious. I only needed like 2 bites, but the rest of it miraculously disappeared on its own.

Really, you should go here.

Top 5 things about Luci Ancora
1. The 2 different kinds of lamb
2. Risotto
3. Blueberry apricot cheesecake
4. Ravioli
5. Atmosphere – it’s classy without being pretentious

Bottom 5 things
1. Gerd and EyeHeartPizza would have gotten along splendidly, especially eating Italian food
2. It was pretty loud in there because of the giant parties
3. There were a lot of things I’d like to try there
4. The sauce on the ravioli could have been better
5. No Dew

www.ristoranteluci.com