The newly opened restaurant and bar, Mondo, located on Main Street, offers both classic and stylized Italian-American culinary fare at an affordable price. The restaurant is spacious with high ceilings and expansive arched windows, and the menu features many Italian-American dishes, which excel in their jazzed up simplicity.

There are half-a-dozen fairly traditional salads and pastas with meatballs, meat sauces, and breaded chicken alongside paninis and grinders with characteristic Mediterranean sauces, cheeses, and cured meats. The centerpiece of the Mondo menu is their specialty: pizza. The pizza selection includes design-your-own pizzas, specialty pies, and artisan varieties that only come in personal sizes with striking flavor combinations such as prosciutto and arugula, and egg and truffle oil. The portions run large; a small was still generous.

One particularly pleasing aspect of the space is the open kitchen—you can peer into the culinary inner-workings conventionally concealed from patrons. The music was ideal for a college-crowd, featuring tunes by Andrew Bird, Band of Horses, and Radiohead.

To warm up my palette and begin our dining experience, my date and I ordered the eggplant fries and fried mozzarella. The eggplant filling was full-bodied, and had a wonderfully silken texture. The mozzarella was equally satisfying: well salted and moist. In contrast to typically served fried appetizers, neither of the batter casings were overly saturated with oil. Although the shell of the fried mozzarella could have been improved by one less turn of the pepper mill, the appetizer was still a hit. The accompanying marina sauce was perhaps a note too tart. However, it was made from fresh tomatoes, a characteristic to be lauded.

For the first entree, we tried the bianco, an artisan pizza made with organic crust, and topped with a triumvirate of high quality cheeses: fresh mozzarella, goat cheese, and ricotta. The pizza was embellished with lightly caramelized red onions, toasted pine nuts, and truffle honey. The addition of truffle honey was delicious, adding a savory syrup dimension to the pizza. The crust was thin, soft, fresh, and had an indefinable melt-in-your-mouth quality. It was an excellently executed pizza; the flavor combinations were complex and truly delicious. For the second entrée, we ordered a turkey grinder, which, rather unfortunately, was simple and uninspired. To my disappointment, Mondo doesn’t yet have a dessert menu, although the waitress believed that within the next few months they would begin serving sweets.

The service was terrific. Reported to have only been working at Mondo for three days, our waitress was efficient, personable, and answered my (perhaps annoyingly high amount of) questions with ease.

All in all, I applaud Mondo for their creative and successful pizzas, cheerful environment, as well as proficient service, and urge you to stop in for a meal.

– 10 Main Street

– Open Monday-Thursday (11:00 am to 11:00 pm), Friday and Saturday (11:00 am-12:00 am), and Sunday (12:00 pm-10:00pm)

– $$

-4 out of 5 stars