A restaurant can be a lot of different things at once.
Adelina is a new downtown destination under the capacious umbrella of celebrity chef Fabio Viviani. It’s sleek and trendy — its words — and often attracts the ensuing fashionable, want-to-be-seen clientele.
Adelina can function like a classic steakhouse if diners choose — the option to simply order a filet mignon, martini, and Caesar salad stares you right in the face. It’s a place to celebrate a raucous birthday or grab a showy craft cocktail on a date. And although it positions itself as Italian-Mediterranean fusion, Adelina is at its best when it celebrates humble Italian fare.
That’s why you should order like a nonna.
When I left Adelina, I couldn’t help but think of my late grandmother — the Greek one who married into an Italian family and learned how to cook like her mother-in-law. When I was a kid, our family would gather around a clothed picnic table on her porch each Sunday, the lot of us eating meatballs, sausage and peppers, pasta, and salad from a big wooden bowl while hummingbirds frantically buzzed around plastic bird feeders. Italian polka played from an old radio that sat on the windowsill.
No, the ambiance doesn’t exactly fit (although I love the idea of my grandma ordering a drink with a smoking skull on top), but if I could take her to Adelina, I know what we’d eat, and it would be that same Sunday meal.
Surprisingly, there’s a lot to sort through in Adelina’s concise menu, but the move is to order as if it’s Sunday. Order from the heart. Order with feeling, with sensitivity.
Order the meatball.
Who among us doesn’t want to be comforted by the tenderness of a giant, softball-size mince made from Michigan Wagyu beef?
In addition to being enormous, the meatball at Adelina is wonderfully delicate. Slicing it with the edge of a fork yields a clean, soft, cakelike sliver that’s intensely savory and tender, a texture achieved through the use of ricotta cheese and only a scarce amount of breadcrumbs. It needs to be said that the red sauce at Adelina is excellent — a bright and mouth-smacking concoction that, frankly, I wish reared its head more throughout the menu. Yes, good marinara is about choice ingredients, but it’s also about proper alchemy, and the chefs at Adelina are red sauce scientists.
Adelina again hits its stride with its ode to sausage and peppers. Chunks of house-made Italian sausage bloom from their casing and are carefully laid in a dish with blistered tomatoes, charred peppers, small dots of potato, red onions, balsamic vinegar, and Gorgonzola cheese sauce. The balsamic reduction adds a necessary amount of piquancy; the cheese deep funkiness. It’s much more chefly than the Sunday-style peppers and onions of my youth, but the thoughtful and updated composition resonates warmly just the same. I wish my grandmother were alive to see how far sausage and peppers has come.
Then there are some things that might not agree with her palate.
I have eaten a few hundred orders of linguine and clams in my lifetime, and Adelina’s take is the boldest yet. While a proper linguine alle vongole usually features dried red pepper flakes, Adelina’s tagliolini and clams also includes a generous spike of freshly ground black pepper. I found myself wondering if this was just a chef’s heavy hand on this particular night or if the clam dish was meant to pack so many layers of heat.
The tagliolini itself is a deviation from traditional, wider pastas like linguine or tagliatelle. The thin pasta swells and absorbs the buttery, peppery sauce. My only gripe here (and perhaps a personal one) is that I would have preferred it without the blistered tomatoes, which seemed to distract from an otherwise spicy and sumptuous dish. (They’ve since been removed from the tagliolini).
The casarecce with Wagyu ragù is satisfying but perhaps overly rich and creamy. The ravioli — stuffed with a creamy pea filling and coated with guanciale fat and butter — anchors the pasta menu nicely, but the gnocchetti with veal and mushrooms did little to impress. Thankfully, the gnocchetti has been revamped with homemade sausage and wild mushroom and porcini ragù.
And there lies the problem with reviewing a new restaurant — it is often a work in progress.
The chefs at Adelina continue to experiment and find their footing in the midst of rapid success.
With upwards of 350 customers being turned over on a Saturday night, I get the sense that it’s a restaurant catching its breath. Adelina has room to grow, but after meeting the team, I believe they’ll find their groove sooner rather than later.
Chefs Gabriel Botezan and Marco Dalla Fontana helm Adelina’s menu, with pastry chef Gabriela Botezan overseeing the desserts. The restaurant is a reunion of sorts for the three chefs. Gabriel Botezan and Dalla Fontana worked together at the now-closed Bacco Ristorante, where they clicked instantly, becoming great friends and colleagues. Gabriela Botezan is married to Gabriel and was, as the story goes, reluctantly pulled into Bacco’s kitchen by her husband.
Though she doesn’t receive billing on Adelina’s website in the form of a headshot and bio, Gabriela deserves high praise for her work. Everything she touches oozes with a delicate touch and personal sensibility. Her tiramisu is persuasive in texture alone — ladyfinger cookies soaked in espresso are layered with mascarpone mousse and coffee ganache, with no liquor or egg whites in her recipe. The result is something unexpectedly creamy and condensed, the type of dessert that has you hanging on to your spoon like a gleeful toddler.
A sextuplet of ricotta zeppole are perfectly light and doughy, and though they’re dusted with granulated sugar, the fine-drawn hint of orange makes a more lasting impression. A delightfully bitter chocolate sauce and a tangy raspberry reduction are proper companions to the small Italian donuts.
Gabriela craves the less saccharine European desserts. Born in Transylvania, she also spent four years in Italy working as a server, where she developed an affinity for Italy’s wide catalog of sweets. Adelina is a chance for her to re-create the desserts from her four-year stint in Venice, but also those of Romania, where subtle flavors are celebrated more than loud, sugary ones.
Adelina’s pastry whiz is also responsible for its stellar focaccia. Though not as thin as a Genovese-style focaccia, it’s still got that same crispy, crunchy outer crust you’ll find at cafés across Liguria. The bread’s accompaniments — whipped ricotta, crispy garlic, rosemary, and green olives — add a wonderful spectrum of flavor. It should be said that Adelina also serves fresh espresso drinks, so it’s completely possible to experience a traditional Genovese breakfast — focaccia dipped directly into cappuccino — albeit in the evening.
No, Adelina won’t be open for breakfast, but there’s a lot to dream about.
There’s not a doubt in my mind that, if it chose, Adelina could serve the best chicken Parmesan in the city. I similarly yearn for Gabriela’s focaccia to bookend ribbons of mortadella and burrata cheese for a sandwich. Dalla Fontana says that lunch is simply not a possibility at the moment, as the restaurant continues to serve customers at a breakneck speed for dinner.
With the seasons, sections of the menu will rotate, giving the chefs unique opportunities to find what works. Veal limone has been replaced with a veal Milanese — a crispy, breaded cutlet served simply with lemon wedges. Sausage has stayed on the menu but is instead a summer iteration utilizing pan-seared banana peppers. Adelina intends to capitalize on each season, and its produce, to strike a balance between consistency and creativity.
In the process, perhaps a clearer identity will take shape. Admittedly, Adelina can be hard to pin down.
I have spent the better part of a week pondering the restaurant’s many personalities. Sometimes, it feels traditionally Italian.
On occasion, it seems to imitate a fancy steakhouse or cocktail bar. But at its best, I have decided that Adelina is a modern red-sauce joint in disguise.
The meatball, sausage and peppers, fresh bread, ravioli, and tiramisu — it could all be served alfresco in the park and I wouldn’t bat an eye. Instead, however, it’s on the ground floor of the One Campus Martius building, a 16-story, 1.3 million-square-foot facility downtown. But amid all that steel and concrete, there’s a soul in there.
I won’t go back to Adelina to enjoy the theatrics of a tableside flavor blaster or to order hamachi crudo served in the shape of a Christmas wreath. No, you can find me alone at the bar, eating a giant meatball with a glass of red wine or having a classic gin martini at 5 p.m. on a Wednesday (hint: the bartenders at Adelina make a great one).
Or maybe I’ll stumble in for a late-night tiramisu or find some comfort in the lovely focaccia on a rainy day. Adelina can meet you in many different moods.
Adelina is located at 1040 Woodward Ave., Detroit. Call 313-246-8811 or visit adelinadetroit.com for more information.
This story originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on Sept. 6.
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