For as long as I can remember, Tom has declared DiMartino’s one of the best roast beef poor boys out there. Huh? Di Martino’s is known for its muffulettas.
It wasn’t until I started going with him that I understood that DiMartino’s is considerably more than both. The family goes back to the Italian markets of the early 20th century. The DiMartino family had a stall there, where they sold meats and produce and fish. Peter DiMartino grew up watching this Italian immigrant story in action, and it never left him. After working in the corporate world he gave in to his entrepreneurial spirit and great memories from those days and opened DiMartino’s on the West Bank in 1975, selling both muffulettas and poor boys. Two more locations followed, the most extensive one in Covington as recently as 2011.
It was here that I discovered why Tom was enthralled with the sandwich. Peter has a proprietary Italian seeded loaf made by Leidenheimer’s just for him, and he uses the eye of the round instead of regular beef roast. It is sliced very thinly and is moist from gravy that is not dripping. This is not a sloppy sandwich, but it is a delicious taste, ample but not too much meat and gravy and the bread is lightly toasted before serving.
It is indeed a great sandwich, though I wouldn’t call it classic. It surprises me that Tom loves this sandwich because the gravy has a hint of beef bouillon base to it, something that Tom abhors. I think the flavor is great. I highly recommend this. Peter says it is modeled after all the Uptown sandwich shops that sold roast beef poor boys to the dock workers “back in the day.”
The muffuletta is also not the best version of the local phenom, but it is very good. I have become accustomed to
ridiculously overstuffed muffulettas with so much meat there is usually enough for another sandwich. Who needs this? The DiMartino’s sandwich is more classic in that there is a proper amount of everything. You will run out of bread and meat at the same time. What makes the DiMartino muffuletta special is the olive salad, which is very special indeed. It comes atop the little Italian salad you can get with an entree, or it is the feature of the large Italian salad. The olive oil in this olive salad is what I would call luxurious, and it is studded with olives and giardiniera vegetables, all of which come together to make perhaps the definitive version of this New Orleans Sicilian trademark. It is made in-house using a premium organic olive oil.
I like this muffuletta very well, though it is still not why I would go to DiMartino’s. The menu at the Covington location is large. We have still not eaten our way around it, because we like what we like so well we stick to our habits.
It’s only recently that I finally ordered the onion rings there, which I have longed for every time I saw a large pile of them delivered to another table. They are light, crispy, airy, and greaseless. It is a mound that will disappear no matter how many people are at the table. My only complaint about this delicious starter is the accompanying sauce, which is just not to my taste, though I could imagine it being a favorite of a lot of people. In color, it reminds me of the onion mum sauce back in the days of the Outback bloomin’ onion phenom. But this seems to have more tomato in it. Regardless of the dipping sauce, these are always terrific onion rings.
This is an odd thing to focus on, but it is a big focus of mine: DiMartino’s does the best broccoli out there. It is consistently cooked to what I call the sweet spot, fork-tender but not mushy in any way. There is an art and a science to perfect broccoli, and DiMartino’s has it mastered. I must get it every visit.
This is an easy thing to do because Tom’s reigning favorite thing to order here is the garlic chicken. It comes with a perfectly fluffy baked potato, and this broccoli, nestled in a white ramekin dish with a top and handle, is smothered in melted butter and copious amounts of grated Parmesan cheese.
The dish’s namesake should not be mentioned last, but the vegetable partners are just so exceptionally good they take center stage. The chicken is great too though. This grilled garlic chicken breast comes with melted butter, a little parsley, and a lot of chopped garlic. The chicken comes with two sides which can be subbed out, and sometimes we trade potato for a side Italian salad, also delicious with that luxurious olive oil and giardiniera vegetables. Another favorite for Tom is the Chicken Florentine, which is the same grilled chicken with spinach and artichoke dip napped on top.
Oddly, the least interesting things on this menu tend to be Italian dishes. The meatballs and spaghetti is a very ordinary version of the popular dish, with angel hair pasta and two large meatballs in a sweeter-style red sauce. Since this is the house red sauce, all the Italian dishes are also pretty ordinary.
We haven’t had the burger or any other sandwich, but the fried seafood is also good. In fact, they do a good job of frying anything.
This is a pretty glamorous neighborhood restaurant. The first two on the West Bank are fast-casual with heavy take-out. The third and most ambitious of the three DiMartino’s, the one in Covington, started out with the fast-casual format but has settled after much tweaking into a very handsome full-service restaurant.
Here are some of the best servers we encounter everywhere. There is attentive service in a lot of places, but I find the servers here especially kind. I always leave feeling like we have been treated extraordinarily well.
It took a while for me to come around to Tom’s enthusiasm about DiMartino’s. I wish I had done it sooner. A lot of great meals were missed.
