Aroma's, Bartlesville, OK

Today is my parents' 51st wedding anniversary, so last night we had a family dinner to celebrate. I drove up to Bartlesville and we went to Aroma's, an Italian place downtown. They were packed. The local high school seemed to be having some kind of winter formal last night, and the restaurant was half full of girls in $500 cocktail dresses with uncoordinated purses and uncomfortable boys who removed their suit coats and hung them over the backs of their chairs. I also found it very interesting that when it came time to deal with their checks, it was the *girls* who flipped out mummy and daddy's plastic to pay....

Anyway, we started with some very lovely crab cakes presented on a bed of mesclun greens and accompanied by what could best be described as a lime mousseline sauce. They were each good sized and thick, and appeared to have been breaded in Japanese bread crumbs. They had good flavor and just enough cayenne bite to be interesting. The salads were heavy with spinach and watercress, and the house dressing was a balsamic vinaigrette.

Our entrees were all different. My dad had a beef medaliions dish that looked like a thick tomato based beef stew served over a huge bed of garlic mashed potatoes, and included haricots verts and long whole baby carrots all of which were al dente (which my father hates!) and some very interesting sweet roasted peppers of some type. Mom had the Tuscan tuna special, which I talked her into doing "medium" rather than well done, that was a huge serving of grilled tuna and vegetables over a citrus seafood risotto. My main course was a serving bowl full of seven large round ravioli filled with a flavorful herbed ricotta mixture and swimming in a rather-too-thin lemon cream sauce. Because service from the kitchen had been rather slow, the waiter brought us another complementary serving of crab cakes.

For dessert, mom had an Italian cream cake, dad had a triple chocolate cake, and I had a bowl of zabaglione with assorted fresh berries, and the waiter got extra credit points for bringing our coffee *after* we had finished our desserts.

All in all, it was a very nice dinner for Bartlesville. Service was slow, but there appeared to be only three or four waiters (plus assistants) in the entire restaurant, and the high school dance crowd taxed their efficiency--a normal Saturday night would have been better. Our waiter was very nice, too, seemed to be well trained, and he had a charming European accent.....I wasnt' sure if he was Italian or eastern European, since I heard aural cues for both, but I did notice he was wearing a shirt with subtle Latin phrases printed on it, so maybe he was an Italian.