A Riviera Runs Through It

While Rocca’s menu may aim to capture the essence of Liguria, at heart it offers big, saucy, generic Italian food of the kind that has captivated Boston diners since Michela’s introduced Todd English to the world (after Larson, who discovered him, sent him on a tour of northern Italy). But that’s not to say the portions here are overly large—in fact they’re surprisingly restrained, which makes the prices a bit less of a bargain than they might seem. Nor are there way too many things on a plate, as English became (and remains) notorious for.

Much of the food is carefully and sometimes painstakingly constructed. An example is an appetizer of poached fresh sardines lightly marinated in lemon and hot Fresno pepper ($9). The combination of lemon, radish, and mint in the marinade is “magical,” the chef, Tom Fosnot, told me, and I agree. (Fosnot, a Larson veteran, was Jody Adams’s sous chef at Rialto and took over at Blu after Dante de Magistris made his stunning debut there.)

Overall, though, flavors are more melded than distinct, another Larson group trademark. This works beautifully in anything with Fosnot’s gemlike pesto, the flagship sauce of Liguria. The one true way to make pesto is to pound the basil, nuts, and oil by hand, which is what Fosnot told me he does. This method keeps the basil a vibrant grass green, as if shocked into releasing its brightest notes straight into the sauce. The basil here is both gentle and authoritative, as it is in Liguria—it’s often much too strong in America, but the basil Fosnot gets from the passionate Eva Sommaripa of Eva’s Garden, in paradisal South Dartmouth (the Liguria of Massachusetts), seems just right. Proper pesto is so vivid you want to spread it over minestrone with plenty of diced vegetables, or atop a deep-flavored fish stew. Ligurians do all that and so does Fosnot, giving life to an otherwise ordinary, if nicely fresh, vegetable minestrone with white beans ($8) and spooning it in place of aioli over the Ligurian fish stew burrida ($21), heavy on good Wellfleet clams from the highly regarded Pat Woodbury.

Fosnot also combines pesto with potatoes and green beans for the most traditional, and to my mind most accomplished, offering at Rocca: mafaldine alla genovese ($10), dried ribbon pasta in a sauce made substantial with potato water—a broth almost as miraculous in its thickening properties as pasta water, and much used in wheat-poor Liguria (whose climate is too cool for that crop, though it’s what makes for that wonderfully delicate olive oil). Savvy diners know to order the trofie, handmade corkscrew pasta characteristic of the region, not just with the listed pesto ($10) but also with potatoes and green beans, which makes it more authentic and even better: Pesto on potatoes is as revelatory as pesto on pasta.