Here’s What to Order at Pendolino
Pendolino, in the Chastain Park neighborhood, touches on Italian elements — but don’t call it an Italian restaurant. Instead, chef-owner Kevin Maxey draws inspiration from the Italian approach to food and dining. “I wanted it to be an Italian-style restaurant where we channel any form of Italian food, whether it’s Naples or Piedmont, or New York and New Jersey,” he says. “Beyond that, tying it into the food that people in the South are used to eating.”
Maxey’s ethos is rooted in his own Texan upbringing. He grew up in Dallas, but had family ties to east Texas, close to the Louisiana border, where his paternal grandfather was a rancher and farmer. He raised Hereford cattle and grew strawberries and beans. “I come from that sort of background of sitting on the porch with grandma, sucking peas when you’re a little kid, and having food be a big part of gatherings,” says Maxey. He stays true to that upbringing today by changing his ingredients often to reflect what’s seasonally available.
The restaurant resides in a shopping center in the Chastain Park area. Maxey previously worked at Superica, Ford Fry’s Tex-Mex chain, and he used that model as a prototype for Pendolino. “We’re taking a genre of food that people are familiar with and not particularly reinventing it, but updating it and making it approachable,” says Maxey. “Making it slightly upscale, but the kind of place that could be everyday dining, like a neighborhood anchor, but then sort of refined enough to be destination dining as well.” On a weeknight, it’s not unusual to see the light-filled, green-tinged dining room buzzing with young families, older couples, and 30-somethings out for dinner. The restaurant currently offers weekend brunch and lunch, but it may not be around forever.
Oh, and there’s plenty of free parking. Here are the five dishes (and drinks) to order at Pendolino.
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Mushroom and fior di latte pizzette
Maxey wanted a wood-burning oven at Pendolino and admired how Roberta’s in Brooklyn turns out inspired pizzas alongside great cocktails. Only, he didn’t want his restaurant to only be known for its pizzas, so he came up with a solution in the form of 10-inch pizzettes. They’re made with King Arthur flour and the dough ferments for three days, adding depth to the pleasantly chewy flatbread. Of the pizzettes, which make great appetizers or light meals, the mushroom is a standout. “Right now, we’re doing it with oyster mushrooms and a little bit of garlic cream sauce,” says Maxey. It’s finished with pecorino and a salsa verde of parsley, basil, capers, and olive oil.
Chicory salad “carbonara”
“The idea of the chicory salad is taking something that’s a little bit bitter and sort of sometimes hard to approach, and then adding enough contrasting flavors and elements to sort of soften up those edges,” says Maxey. In this case, bitter greens combine with a guanciale vinaigrette made with garlic, honey, and white balsamic vinegar. The result? “We get this really rich sort of fatty, porky sauce, and that sweetness from the white balsamic and the honey sort of balances out a little bit of those bitter tones from the greens,” he says. There’s also a creamy basil aioli, pecorino, and a soft boiled egg in the mix as well as a six-minute egg served atop the salad. “So sort of taking those flavors and elements of traditional pasta carbonara, and putting them into a salad with some bitter greens that need a little help to become user-friendly,” says Maxey.
BBQ octopus
An appetizer, this standout dish sees braised octopus cooked in the wood-burning oven which sometimes, depending on how the wood burns, imbues the octopus with a smokey flavor. “When we cook the octopus in that hot oven and the cast iron skillet, you get a really crispy sort of exterior,” says Maxey. Inspired by American barbecues, the octopus is served alongside a Southern potato salad made with chopped celery, herbs, salt, and pepper. “Then we just start layering on those pickled celery, crispy pepperoni, and the crispy charred octopus, and then we have some roasted sweet peppers that go on that as well,” he adds.
Halibut “piccata”
The halibut, says Maxey, speaks to the simplicity of Italian dining. In March through November, Maxey uses an Alaskan halibut while the rest of the year it’s sourced from Nova Scotia. “That’s one of my favorite fish, just sort of rich and buttery and soft and flaky and easy to love,” he says. He pairs it with butter beans, which are a Southern staple. People are often surprised to see the two ingredients together, but the pairing works well. The beans are in the dish year-round, but other elements change; artichokes in the spring and summer, bitter greens in the winter. “We’ve been doing that with a piccata sauce for some time now,” says Maxey. “So that’s just a little bit of garlic and butter and capers, and the super light sauce gets finished with a little bit of lemon juice, a little bit more olive oil.”
Seasonal spritzes
The Little Black Dress of Italian drinks, spritzes can be enjoyed any time, any place, with any food. The standby of the spritz menu is the Mamma Mia, a blend of citrus vodka, elderflower liqueur, Prosecco, and grapefruit soda. While you can order a classic Aperol or Hugo spritz, other variations rotate in and off the menu throughout the year. “Over the winter, we did a Sorrento spritz with limoncello as the base, a little lemon soda, and Prosecco,” says Maxey. They also crafted a spritz made with Lambrusco and winter spice-infused syrup which was a big hit. “I think the idea of spritzes, they’re light, they’re approachable, they’re low ABV, they’re refreshing and easy to love.”
Lia Picard is a lifestyle writer who has called Atlanta home for more than a decade. She writes about food, travel, and design for publications like the New York Times, Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, and Atlanta magazine. When Lia’s not writing, she can be found on an Atlanta adventure with her husband and daughter. Follow her on Instagram. Follow Resy, too.
