First & Last Tavern

Friday turned out to be my ode to the South End. After lunch at the Corner Grinder (see below), I went for dinner with my neighbor (who came with me to the Primavera Pub) to the First & Last Tavern on Maple Ave. I have been going to the F&L since I came to Hartford in 1994, but I especially like going with my neighbor because he grew up just a few blocks away. Needless to say, he's a regular.

In fact, one of the great things about the F&L in Hartford is the large number of regulars who have been going there for 30, 40, or even 50 years. Almost all are originally from Hartford and though most now live in Wethersfield, Newington, Rocky Hill, or West Hartford, they still make a weekly (or at least monthly) pilgrammage. In fact, some nights you get the sense that everyone in the place knows everyone else. Now, that's a neighborhood restuarant.

The F&L has been around since 1938. With the closure of the Municipal Cafe (1929) on Main Street a couple of years ago, the F&L has to be the oldest restaurant in the city, if not the area. Until 1983 the F&L was operated by the DiMillos. Since then, it has been owned and operated by the DePasquales.

Until just before I moved to Hartford, the F&L was a tiny little spot that consisted of the area to the left of the "&" symbol in the picture above. The menu was simple - 14 (numbered "1" through "14") entrees, built around, shells, spaghetti, sausage and peppers, meatballs, and your basic grinders, and you sat in one of about 8 or 9 old-fashioned wooden booths or at the small bar. The expansion of the F&L allowed for a full dining room, expanded menu options, and pizza.

It is not fair to compare the F&L to a fine dining establishment because that is not what it is, or what it tries to be. What we are talking about is a family-type neighborhood restaurant and the food measures up perfectly well to that standard (actually very well).

When I go to the F&L I usually have a 10 1/2 (spaghetti with 1 meatball and 1 sausage; spaghetti with meatballs is #10 on the menu and spaghetti with sausage is #11). Because I was with my neighbor the regular, however, we had several different things and I am not sure that everything we had is actually on the menu the way it was served to us (I have absolutely no idea what it all cost as he picked up the tab in consideration for my having bought drinks and appetizers earlier last week at Salute). Then again, the F&L (at least the one in Hartford) is exactly the type of place where you can substitute and mix and match without drawing the ire of the kitchen and the disapproval of the wait-staff, so I would bet you could duplicate our dinner if you wanted to.

We started with meatballs and sausages in sauce with a basket of bread. F&L has a bakery across the street (where there is a nice parking lot to supplement the tiny lot behind the restaurant) and they bake all their bread, so it is pretty much always quite fresh and delicious. F&L also makes all their own pasta sauce (which is also available in good-sized jars). It is not as good as my wife's gravy (which is what many Italian-Americans call pasta sauce) but nothing is, except maybe my mother-in-law's. Still, it is tasty. The meatballs and sausages were (as always) good-sized, hot, and delicious.

I also had some little neck clams from the raw bar. They were not ocean-fresh (we are 40 miles inland, after all) but they were still good and did still have a faint taste of the Atlantic (or at least Long Island Sound).

We often have an order of hot peppers and/or roasted peppers, but having been at the Corner Grinder just a few hours earlier I had had my fill of peppers for the day, especially because the F&L's peppers pack plenty of heat (they are not watered down for the bland palettes of the mass market).

For dinner I had a small (12") anchovy pizza and my neighbor had a small bacon pizza. F&L serves authentic thin-crust pizza. It may not be as good as Frank Pepe's Original Neapolitan Pizza in New Haven, but what is? Still, it is the best thin crust pizza in the area by a good margin.

The anchovy pizza came with plenty of anchovies and also had ground peppers and spices sprinkled on top. It was delicious. The bacon pizza is sprinkled with crispy chunks of bacon. It is probably ridiculously unhealthy, but it was delicious as well.

For desert we each had a hot fudge sundae made with vanilla Haägen Dazs. It is the perfect way to top off a night of rich, spicy Italian food.

One of the things that makes the F&L a great place to visit are the many old pictures of Hartford which are on prominent display. There are quite a few in the "new" dining room area, but there are many more in the "old" part of the restaurant. When you look at those pictures you get a real sense of what Hartford was once like, and if you are sitting in the "old" part of the restaurant (which although clean and well-kept, looks pretty much exactly as it must have looked when the F&L opened) you can imagine yourself back in the 1940's or 50's, ordering a 7 or a 9 1/2 (or something).

The service at the F&L is about what you'd hope for at a neighborhood family-type restaurant; friendly and hardworking.

If you go to the F&L in Hartford on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, you are going to have to wait, so you need to be prepared for that. You can usually wait at the bar, however.

The F&L has a bunch of different locations outside of Hartford and I have been to the ones in Avon and Middletown. The food is the same but the experience is not. The F&L is one of Hartford's enduring institutions and if you really want to experience it, you have to go to the source.

Here is the link the F&L's website - http://www.firstandlasttavern.com/hartford/index.htm