Villa Dolce

In a word: Short and sweet? No and yes.

The specs: #0712  
Address, hours & details via Isthmus; reviews at Tales from the Crib, Middleton Times Tribune, City Search, Yahoo! Travel, Mad City Girl, J Lamore, NBC 15, Ruppert Food Blog; listing at Eat Drink Madison; Twitter, Facebook, official web site,

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JM and Nichole ate the BBQ chicken pizza and a Nutella crepe.
JM had lemonade and Nichole had a sidecar.
The bill was $40, or $20/person, plus tip.
JM and Nichole gave Villa Dolce a B+ (see our grading rubric).

Villa Dolce gave us a sugar rush. The dissonant, eerie sound of a drum corps warming up from the field by St. Barnard's was the only sour counterpoint to our sweet drinks, pizza, and dessert.

JM went for his customary lemonade, which was very fruity. Nichole opted for a sidecar on the rocks primarily because in with the cognac, cointreau, and lemon juice was limoncello, which she'd been fixated on since picking up one of those 79-cent bags of almost-overdue lemons at Woodman's. The drink was also fruity-sweet and strong.

The menu is compact but has many appealing pizzas; we went with another sweet choice, the BBQ chicken. This interpretation includes red pickled peppers, red onions, and cilantro. The sweet sauce was thinly applied and the crust was deliciously salty, puffy, and light.

After the pizza arrived we noticed a long gap between visits from our server. This we attributed less to her skills, which were expert, than to bad table assignment and layout. Villa Dolce has a bar, a dining room, a porch, and an L-shaped patio, and servers seemed to be randomly assigned to tables rather than to contiguous sections. We saw a lot of harried scurrying.

The relaxed pace gave us a chance to crane our necks at what other tables were having. An amazing caprese salad walked by - a large tomato had been sliced, blossom-end down and still connected, and mozzarella interfiled between the slices. The closest representation we could find is in a drool-worthy Flickr photostream by FotoosVanRobin. And while we finished the pizza more out of boredom than hunger, it didn't keep either of us from getting dessert.

The Nutella crepe was light on the Nutella and the crepe but big on the berries, including a chocolate-dipped, juicy, red strawberry. The hazelnut gelato had a pleasant nutty grittiness. There are probably two dozen gelato flavors to choose from; we'd definitely stop by for a dish if we were strolling through downtown Middleton.

Comments

[Joey]

The pear gorgonzola pizza is to die for!

[theginn]

Nice place, good atmosphere. We went on a Groupon deal and had a very nice meal. Happy hour looked like fun. Will have to get back to check it out. Much welcome and needed addition to the west side.