Tramonti in Delray Beach - New York's "Little Italy" Food at Its Finest in Florida

Finding an excellent (non-Cuban or Peruvian) meal in South Florida can be more challenging than finding Atlantis. Of all the ethnic cuisines here, I've found Italian restaurants to have the most consistently good food, if actually run by Italian people, with nary a clunker. But, Italian cuisine has never been my favorite ... with one exception: Tramonti's in Delray Beach on bustling Atlantic Avenue. Although I live in Delray myself, I shy away from bustling Atlantic Avenue for the simple reason that most Atlantic Avenue restaurants are geared to the Walmart tastes of tourists from New Jersey and priced accordingly. But, last Christmas/Hannukah, we were given a gift certificate to Tramonti with the assurances that the food lived up to its New York "Little Italy" pedigree.

And Tramonti's is indeed the Florida branch of Angelo of Mulberry Street, a 100 year old Little Italy landmark restaurant. So, I was hopeful.

I figured that the $100 gift certificate probably wouldn't cover dinner for two, so we went for lunch. We were seated on the people-watching front patio. I opened the menu and, as I originally suspected, everything was ala carte and expensive even at lunchtime. We ordered appetizers and a main dish. And then the Burrata appetizer arrived. It was a fist-sized ball of white cheese that could easily be mistaken for fresh buffala mozzarella (which I love), but it wasn't. It was better! When I cut into the ball of cheese, a wonderfully creamy ricotta-like center was revealed. I had never experienced a piece of cheese like this one. It was a texture and taste extravaganza perfectly accented with wafer thin slices of prosciutto ham and non-stop warm hunks of Italian bread. The meal could've stopped right then and there, and it still would've ranked as one of the best meals I had ever had. Then the black linguini with seafood arrived. Incredible.

For me, the sign of an excellent meal as opposed to a good meal is whether I can still remember what I ate at least a week after the meal. This was one of those kind of meals.

After this first lunch, I placed Tramonti's at the top of my special occasion restaurant list.