Phantom Gourmet: Osteria Nino In Burlington

BURLINGTON - People always want to know where to go for great, authentic Italian food. The North End? Federal Hill? Phantom Gourmet's Dave Andelman says – go to Burlington. That's the home of Osteria Nino, the brainchild of Phantom friend, and Boston nightclub guru, Patrick Lyons.

The recipes are just like what you'll find in Rome, so Osteria Nino really is the closest you can get to Italy without leaving the Boston suburbs.

It's located in the Third Ave shopping plaza in Burlington, with an open kitchen on one side, a large bar right in the middle, and an outdoor patio with its own Tuscan-style wood-burning pizza oven. It was all inspired by Patrick's spur of the moment decision to move to Italy for a year, and his obsession with real Italian food.

"I ate so much incredible food. I ate so much incredible pasta. And the flavors, it was wonderful," he said. "I also lost 18 pounds. Now how does that happen? It's clean; there's no GMOs; there's no hormones; there's no antibiotics and there's very little processed food. Our restaurant is dedicated to an expression of sustainable Italian cooking."

The first dish Patrick presented with pride is a traditional Roman classic dish called Caccio Pepe.

"It's a very, very simple dish. Grown-ups would call their mac & cheese. It's fresh cracked black pepper, house made tonarelli pasta which we make in our kitchen, a pecorino cheese, no butter, no cream. But I can tell you, twirl your fork in that one or two times and you're going to be blown away because it does not taste like three simple items, yet that's all that's in it. It's a knockout."

Dish number two on Patrick's Italian fare tour, Pasta Pomodoro.

"This is a very simple spaghetti with tomato sauce," he said. "We've all had it. In Italy, it's a little bit different. Every time I'd sit down to have a sit of spaghetti and pomodoro it tasted like, 'oh my god, why can't it taste like this back home?' If you just open a can of red sauce and you boil some pasta, it's not going to taste like this."

Another feature of Osteria Nino's menu is their small plates for four, five, six dollars.

"My DNA comes from Lansdowne Street and the night clubs, so bars are near and dear to me. We want to take advantage of bar snacks, because a lot of people like, with their wine, have a lovely little snack. We've got Veltrano olives, which are an imported Sicliian olive. Our meatballs, our executive chefs Chris Boswell and Wallace Venicia have worked and probably redone that recipe no fewer than a dozen times. Our pie's cooked in our wood-fired Italian imported oven. So we've got a classic Margherita pizza."

One section of the dining room has chairs peering right into the kitchen, a type of dinner theater.

"I think that if you're not giving people the total package, which includes entertaining, service, drinks and great food, then you're starting off behind the 8 ball. We do have a mozzarella bar with a lovely booze block top that overlooks our custom made wood fired rotisserie. And our wood fired pizza oven. People want good Italian food. People love good Italian food."

And they can find it at Osteria Nino, located at 19 Third Ave. in Burlington, and online at osterianino.com.

Watch Phantom Gourmet on Saturdays and Sundays at 10:30 and 11 a.m. on myTV38.