Rustico Italian brick oven pizza a find in Mattapoisett

I got a find for you.

I’m sure many have beaten me to the punch, but Rustico, which has been open for some 15 months in some incarnation, provided my wife and I, and even our little dude Cooper, with our best meal in several months.

Rustico -- pronounced Roo-stico -- first started offering takeout brick-oven pizza along with salads, sandwiches and pasta dishes in the old location of How on Earth on Route 6 in May 2018. Cooking up farm-fresh ingredients, house-made dough and unique flavor combinations was the brainchild by owner Al Meninno and chef William “Gui” Aguilar, who had cooked at several restaurants in New Orleans, including Channing Tatum’s Saints and Sinners, and at the Aqua Grille in Sandwich.

An outdoor deck opened in August 2018, but it wasn’t until June of this year that Rustico held its grand opening, introducing a new dining room and dinner menu.

I still remember when I first noticed Rustico. It was a Facebook post, I want to say sometime last summer, promoting a Siracha barbecue short rib pizza. I can’t recall the other ingredients, but I liked every single one of those words and I filed it away as a place to try.

Then a year went by and I heard the dining room was open, so I checked out the menu online, salivating as I announced to Becca that I had found our next review.

We arrived at around 5:30 p.m. on a Sunday evening, quite famished after an afternoon at Reggae on the Beach -- we skipped the food trucks and squirrelled away our appetites. Entering the restaurant side (the Eastern side of the building is for takeout, with its own entrance) we found a quaint, cozily appointed dining room. Down a ramp was another dining room, a little darker and not quite as cute, and in back is a covered deck with another half-dozen tables.

A hodgepodge of tables, from reclaimed wood to traditional oak fill the room, which features wide-board pine walls, an accent wall lined with hanging planters and antique lighting. To the left of the main entrance is a wood-topped corner bar with a dozen or so seats.

Despite being a little early for dinner on a commonly slow night for eating out, the upper dining room was mostly full. We were quickly seated and our waitress, Kayla, swooped in with a carafe of flat water and menus. I asked for a Diet Coke and we ordered a cup of milk for the little guy.

Before I’d seen the menu online, I had been planning on trying the pizza, but after seeing some of the entrees, I altered course and we decided to get a pizza to go at the end of our meal.

The appetizer menu offers several Italian classics, like wedding soup ($5), housemade meatballs ($9) and a charcuterie board (sweet and hot sopressata, prosciutto, olive smoked provolone, gorgonzola and fresh-baked flatbread for $14). What caught our eye was the shrimp all’Aglio for $9.

After a moderate wait -- saddled with an energetic 2-year-old, we get anxious at even average wait times, but we reminded ourselves that a great Italian meal is supposed to be slow, relaxed and unconcerned with the passage of time -- our appetizer arrived (of note, they do not bring bread to the table). Three large shrimp, sauteed perfectly, sat atop a pillowy mattress of scallion polenta. The whole thing swam in a thin sauce that tasted of garlic, sweet onions, white wine and butter. The polenta had a thin, barely crunchy shell that opened to reveal a perfectly mealy, fluffy cornmeal center. While not overly flavorful itself, the polenta sopped up the delicious white wine/butter sauce that I couldn’t get enough of.

The best way to explain how good the appetizer was is that originally we cut the third shrimp up with some pieces of polenta and offered it to our toddler, but he pushed it away with an uninterested grunt. We weren’t about to let such deliciousness go to waste, so we scarfed it down. A minute or two later, having changed his mind as rapidly as a 2-year-old is wont to do, he reached for his plate. Seeing we had eaten his serving, and recognizing there was none left for to enjoy, he spiked his fork on the floor and began to pout. Honestly, I couldn’t blame him. I would have done the same.

I had been planning on ordering the linguine and clams entree, which I had noticed on Rustico’s online menu. Littlenecks with garlic potatoes and black peppercorn bacon served over linguine with a golden pepper coulis for $20 seemed like a perfect light, summer, Italian dish. Unfortunately, it was not on the printed menu. I considered the daily special, a surf and turf with a Mediterranean dry-aged steak and seared scallops with duchess potatoes (think mashed potatoes that look like piped cake frosting), but then I noticed another dish that I hadn’t seen online: The BBQ Korean short ribs. Not Italian, but it reminded me of that pizza I had noticed a year before, and I was sold.

My wife considered the lobster fusilli (not listed online, where the menu is maybe 60 percent correct) served with red onions and tomatoes in a Prosecco cream sauce for ($26). She also looked at the bolognese, made with beef, veal and pork and served over linguine ($17), but in the end she went for a classic chicken parmesan ($17). For Cooper, we ordered the kid’s size fusilli and meatballs ($8).

If you’re looking for even lighter fare, the menu does feature several intriguing salads, and a couple of fish dishes. And of course there’s plenty of brick-oven pizza offerings.

My short ribs were plated beautifully, one strip of four short ribs with a corn relish and a baked sweet onion pepper cake that I was intrigued by. The short ribs were salty and tender and featured more meat than I expected. The slightly sweet, mild barbecue sauce was baked in, not slathered, keeping it from being messy.

While everything on the plate was between very good and excellent, the real star was the corn relish, with bright kernels of sweet corn mixed with crunchy red onions, tomatoes and herbs in a creamy sauce. It was like the most elevated creamed corn I’ve ever had and paired perfectly with the salty, stringy short ribs.

The onion cake was interesting. At first glance, it looks like a veggie cake, and the texture was almost like a parched bread pudding. It was a little dry and on the bland side -- the onion flavor is not prevalent -- but I’d never had anything like it and I like to give points for creativity.

My wife loved her chicken parm. Panko-crusted for extra crispiness, it was topped with fresh mozzarella and reggiano cheese and served over linguine with the housemade marinara. While made with San Marzano tomatoes, it’s not exactly a traditional sauce. Instead of being herbaceous, it’s very sweet, with what I would call “fireside” notes, possibly cinnamon and/or nutmeg, the types of spices that make me think I’m nestled under a blanket on a cold January night sipping hot cider.

Cooper had mixed feelings on his fusilli and meatballs. He devoured the meatballs, which were light and moist and tasted mostly of veal. The fusilli pasta had that homemade chewiness and was cooked al dente, but I think the sauce, which I enjoyed, was a little too much for him. Still, he ate most of it.

Since we hadn’t been out for a dinnertime Dine Out in a while, we were excited to order dessert, but first we put in an order for a small Vo-Vo pizza ($14). Topped with the house red sauce, ground linguica, onions, baby spinach, cherry tomatoes, celery and their house blend mozzarella, we took it home and enjoyed it for dinner the next night. I know this isn’t entirely a fair review -- I reheated it on a sheet pan at 425 degrees for about six minutes -- but I still very much enjoyed the pizza, with its fairly thin, crispy crust that still had some chew to it -- it’s not a cracker-style crust, more like a flatbread. I was excited to try celery on a pizza, but it got a little lost among all the onions, which had been caramelized until they were sweet and had lost their sharpness, which paired well with the savory linguica crumbles. I can only imagine how good it would be straight out of the brick oven.

For dessert, we went with a fudge cake ($8), which narrowly won out over their beignets ($8). Dense dark chocolate, almost like a par-baked brownie, was served with a thick raspberry sauce and topped with whipped cream. Decadent and divine, I forgot how nice it was to end a delicious meal with an appeal to the sweet tooth.

In my mind, there’s two main types of Italian entrees, and I enjoy both. There’s the down-home traditional pasta dishes, spaghetti and meatballs served in heaping sizes with grandma’s traditional sauce. Then there’s the lighter side, with fresh seafood, delicate pasta and wine and oil-based sauces. Rustico bridges the gap magnificently. You can get a hearty bolognese or sauteed shrimp over couscous with capers and feel equally confident ordering either.

In all, our meal came to $85.52 after tax and before tip, and including a pizza to go. The prices, while not overly cheap, certainly lined up with the quality of the food and service.

Dine Out's reviewer visits restaurants unannounced and at his or her discretion. The Standard-Times pays for the meals reviewed. The reviews merely reflect one diner's experience. Ratings range from 1 to 5 stars.

Rustico

Italian/Brick oven pizza

Address: 62 Marion Road, Mattapoisett

Phone: 508-758-1342

Hours: Dine in: 5-9 Sun-Thur, 5-10 Fri-Sat, closed Tuesdays; Take out: 3-9 Mon-Thur, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fri-Sat, 12-9 Sunday, closed Tuesdays

Handicapped access: Yes

Credit cards: Yes

Reservations: Optional

Online: Rusticoma.com

Food: 5

Service: 4

Atmosphere: 4.5

Cleanliness: 5

Price/Value: 4