Moorpark, home of, well, now you come to mention it, not a great deal.  Culinary wise it's claim to fame up until recently was it being home to the Secret Garden, a restaurant that got mauled by Gordon Ramsey on Kitchen Nightmares.  But a year or two ago a new restaurant opened its doors in Moorpark and started getting some quite good reviews - Cafe Firenze.  I ate there for lunch not long after it had opened and had to say the food was good, the service was goddam awful.  The food took ages to arrive, the appetizer didn't appear at all (well it did after prompting and AFTER our main courses arrived) but the atmosphere of the place was good and you could tell that the kitchen was capable of producing quality food.

Some time later the Executive Chef of said restaurant sprang to fame as the most charismatic member of the Top Chef New York series - Fabio Viviani did not win the competition but he certainly won a legion of fans (most of them probably female) for both his down to Earth Tuscan cooking and his wit and charm.  This was my first visit back to Firenze since the Top Chef phenomenon, but I had heard many stories of how absolutely packed the place has become since Top Chef started and on an early Thursday evening that certainly proved to be the case (interestingly I had tried to get in several months earlier for an early dinner on a weekend - it was easier to get into Ramsey at the London!).

Amy and I arrived to sit at the Chef's Table and sample the seven course tasting menu.  I thought this meant sitting at the kitchen counter, apparently not.  However the restaurant was very obliging and moved us to the kitchen counter to sample the menu with a view.  As it happens two members of the Firenze cook  staff we have ties to through friends - pasta chef for the night Richard and John Paolone, the co-Executive Chef and Fabio's right arm.  Have to say both were in fine form and it was very impressive to see the pace and fluidity that John could expedite - especially when there's a party of forty seven sitting on the patio.  Never have I seen food come and go so efficiently and without fuss as when John stood at the pass.

Our first course arrived swiftly, a beautiful piece of imported mozzarella on which sat some oven roasted thinly sliced zucchini finished with a drizzle of olive oil and balsamic.  Very simple, nicely presented it was a great starter for the meal ahead.  From there we moved on to a pasta, butternut squash filled ravioli with a lovely sage and cream butter sauce, crispy sage and a finishing pepper.  The portion was a perfect size, just a few bites and continued the meal nicely. 

The highlight dish of the night followed, a beef carpaccio made from the finest fillet, with a spherical olive, rocket and parmesan.  It was perfectly balanced, the addition of the olive was inspired as was the form in which they'd made basically an olive sauce and repackaged it back into the original olive 'shell'.  Creatively it was the highlight, taste wise it left us wanting to lick the plate clean!  The spherical olive was especially cute, it was something that Fabio did on Top Chef to win a round last year - basically a little touch of molecular gastromeny in Moorpark, via Spain and El Bulli of course.  Basically it's an olive puree then reformed using calcium chloride and sodium alginate, very cute and actually incredibly tasty.

Now the trouble with tasting menus is at some point you usually start getting full, whether it was that factor or the denseness of the course that follows, the experience started to wane.  A large shrimp wrapped in pancetta sat on a bed of polenta with parmesan was overly salty and rather featureless.  There was nothing inspiring about it in the slightest, though the overall taste was good.  Similarly followed a beautiful piece of sea bass on pumpkin mash and a brown butter sauce.  There was a similarity to these dishes starting to form, starch underneath protein on top.  The fish was beautifully cooked, the brown butter sauce rather burnt.  Finally we came to a beautiful piece of fillet mignon, again wonderfully cooked, sitting on a bed of potato truffle mash with gorgonzola sauce.  Nothing was inherently wrong with any of these dishes per se, they just seemed to lack the finesse one would expect of a tasting menu - even in a Tuscan styled restaurant.  Each dish was delicious in its own right, the preparation cannot be faulted but a lighter touch was definitely needed over seven courses and that was lacking in these dishes.  By the end of it I was groaning.

The evening ended with course number seven, definitely a course of redemption.  Just when I thought I couldn't eat another thing along came a beautifully simple plate - olive oil cake with a blueberry compote and a beautiful panna cotta with strawberries and balsamic.  Simple, small and each bite was just wonderful.  I really didn't think I could eat another bite, but I ate the whole thing!

Really the only other note I have that tends toward the negative side was the wine pairing that I chose to have for the food.  I can't say that anything really was wrong with it, they went with the food well, but the choices of wine were fairly mundane and familiar.  I always thought that the joy of a pairing was to find exciting new wines you hadn't tried that tested the palette, there was none of that going on here - cruelly I commented to my wife that I questioned whether the Sommelier spent his afternoons at Vons.  That was harsh!

Overall - well Firenze has come a long way from its somewhat stuttered start, the fame that Fabio has achieved through Top Chef seems to have been well channeled into what looks like an extremely well run restaurant turning out quality food and, from looking at the main courses coming through the pass, in big portions and very efficiently.  I'd absolutely recommend it for an evening out, it certainly has quality that is hard to find in this neck of the San Fernando Valley.