What do Boston, Dubai and Cork, Ireland have in common with Melbourne, Australia, and Vero Beach? All five have Italian restaurants curiously named Scoozi.
The newest of these eateries – each with a different owner who chose a name that loosely translates to “Excuse me” – is Vero’s, a red-and-white-checkered-tablecloth restaurant offering Sicilian-style seafood and pasta.
The latest creation of restaurateur Roger Lenzi, Vero’s Scoozi made its debut a couple of weeks ago in the Old Downtown space until recently occupied by Bijou Noche. Since the ownership is the same, most of Lenzi’s highly competent staff is still in place, so it took virtually no time to get this restaurant running smoothly.
Headline news: While most of the many Italian restaurants in Vero (including Lenzi’s Avanzare) have a northern feel and menu, Scoozi is a throwback to the so-called “red sauce” joints that sprung up in every city where you found the Southern Italian immigrants who flocked to America in the last century.
This isn’t Italian haute cuisine. Featuring six different kinds of parmigiano, it’s more like “soul food” for Italian Americans (though the menu also offers some fine Sicilian seafood entrées).
Look & Feel: Walking into Scoozi is a bit like being in a time warp. With black-and-white photos of the singers of yesteryear lining the entryway walls, the dining room has red-and-white tablecloths, candles on the table, and Sinatra and the Rat Pack providing mealtime musical accompaniment.
And on mild evenings, you can dine under the twinkling canopy on Scoozi’s patio – a festive outdoor area reminiscent of the trattorias along Mulberry Street in New York’s Little Italy.
Food: Over the course of a couple of visits, we had an opportunity to sample four appetizers and seven entrees.
The appetizers we tried were the Arancini ($10), a crispy Sicilian rice ball stuffed with sausage and fresh mozzarella with Sunday gravy dipping sauce; parmesan crusted calamari steak ($12) served with fresh tomato sauce; the roasted Brussel sprout salad ($10) tossed with lemon and olive oil, and topped with toasted almonds and pecorino toscano; and the Sicilian seafood salad ($12) – scungilli, octopus and shrimp in a garlic, olive oil, lemon and oregano sauce.
Of the four, I would give highest marks to the very interesting Brussel sprouts – crisp on the outside, tender on the inside, and in this preparation, very tasty. Running a close second was the Sicilian seafood salad. Quite refreshing.
For main courses, my favorites were the shrimp oreganato ($20) – shrimp topped with oreganato bread crumbs, baked, and finished with a luscious lemon oregano sauce over sautéed spinach – and orecchiette with very tasty sausage and broccoli rabe ($18).
I also tried the seafood acqua pazza ($26). Acqua pazza literally means “crazy water,” and this dish consisted of clams, mussels, shrimp, scallops and chunks of fish simmered in water flavored with capers, garlic, olives, white wine and tomato puree. On this evening, slightly too many olives for my taste.
My husband’s favorite main course was the fire grilled swordfish ($24) – two beautiful pieces of fish, oven-roasted and served over tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers, spinach and lemon. A close second, he said, was the flounder Milanese ($20), a parmesan-crusted flounder very lightly sautéed and topped with arugula tossed with olive oil and lemon.
On our most recent visit, he also was enthusiastic about the sausage and peppers ($16) – two beautiful, large grilled sausages served over roasted peppers and accompanied by crispy garlic potatoes.
Drink: Scoozi has a full bar and an excellent selection of very reasonably priced wines.
Prices: Entrée prices run from the mid-teens to the mid-$20s. With an antipasti, entrée and a glass of wine each, a party of two is likely to spend in the neighborhood of $80 or $90 before tax and tip.
Initial impressions: As snowbirds discover this throwback to Italian restaurants they remember from New Jersey, New York and New England, we suspect Scoozi will become more crowded with each passing week.
I welcome your comments, and encourage you to send feedback to me at [email protected].
The reviewer dines anonymously at restaurants at the expense of Vero Beach 32963.
