It has been almost fifteen years and Metro Café is still making mouth watering pasta and sauce. After spending weeks in Naples, Rome, and Sicily, this food critic would even dare to say that Metro’s pasta and sauce is better than anything she ate in Italy. Blasphemy yes, but don’t dispute it until you have tried the Aosta sauce of goose liver and black truffle with the Spinach tagliatelle pasta.
Stepping into Metro Café, one feels as if they have finally found a nice elegant up-market restaurant. The dim lighting and mahogany tables and chairs with jazz music playing in the background, is perfect for an impressive business lunch or a romantic date for two. This is the place you take someone to impress. Unfortunately, that evening some of the other patrons were, I believe, under dressed. Why go somewhere with such great mood lighting if you aren’t going to act the part?
My lovely dinner dates and I began with an excellent bottle of dry rich Penfolds Rawson’s Retrect Merlot. It was surprising to see that they only had two Italian wines on the entire list, but don’t allow that to deter you. The wines they had they selected well, including Australian Wolfbass. Metro is guaranteed to leave you sighing in ecstasy when you try one of their wines. They range from 200 to 2090 rmb per bottle and 48 to 72 rmb per glass.
We were soon served an Aperitif of bruschetta topped with marinated vegetable and tuna. The bread was perfect, soft but not too moist or soaked in olive oil, and very well garlic. It was a very satisfying appetizer that does it job of warming you up for the meal. However, they were much too small, barley a thumb size and with only six pieces, not necessarily worth the 30 rmb.
The bruschetta was followed with Carpaccio, 70 rmb, thin slices of raw beef filled with capers and garlic and topped with a drizzle of olive oil and parmesan cheese. I thought the Carpaccio was lovely, with a good Italian flavor of basil and oil, but my Australian meat-connoisseur husband say that the meat was too heavily juiced with blocked the taste of the meat.
The mozzarella de pomodoro, 75 rmb of fresh buffalo mozzarella and wine ripe tomatoes infused with olive oil and basil, also divided us on opinion. My husband believed it was served too cold, where as I thought the chilled approach was a refreshing change. We both agreed it was nicely herbed.
Our last appetizer was the Grilled asparagus with pine nuts salsa, 50 rmb, mixed with garlic bits and shaved parmesan cheese, and of course topped with herbs and olive oil. It was quite fresh and nice, but nothing overly satiating. We also received brown and white bread with spinach pesto. The bread was excellent even by Beijing standards, and the pesto was unique but mild.
The pasta and sauces to choose from was almost too much! Traditional Italian pasta and sauce tends to focus on the tomato and less heavy sauces. Metro has the traditional simple Italian pasta and sauces, but their Selection B and C on the menu, is filled with almost too-many choices of unique and daring Italian and Mediterranean combinations!
With anticipation my pasta finally arrived. What can I say but that it was excellent by all gourmet standards. Thick and creamy the combination blended itself perfectly. No single ingredient stood out for my taste buds, but just made my tongue moan in pleasure. The quality of ingredients was made to perfection making it almost unnoticeably perfect. The only description that comes to mind is smooth, so smooth.
Now a word of profound advice: Do not order anything but the pasta! My husband ordered the Salerno, which was prawns in tomato and a cream sauce and olive oil with tortellini, which as he said was simply OK. Quite tomato infused it was like any tortellini you would find in any Italian restaurant outside of Italy. The prawns were also too mushy. It filled him up but wasn’t anything special, especially for 63 rmb.
My Chinese consultant, Catherine, ordered the Shrimp and Crabmeat Risotto, Arborio rice tossed with shrimp and crabmeat with asparagus. The risotto rice is made softer than the traditional Italian way, in order to cater to the Chinese customers who oddly are prone to order this dish. Unfortunately for Catherine and for us expats, we found it to be very bland and not worth 85 rmb.
Fortunately, the meal was saved for my two dinner dates with the arrival of the Tiramisu and Molten Lava Chocolate Cake, two dishes we could not find on the menu. The Molten Lava cake was a great volcanic blast of melted smooth hot chocolate sauce encased by a soft cake crust. The tiramisu was also good, though for those who like their Tiramisu to have a good taste of brandy, they will be disappointed. The tiramisu was very light and fluffy, and like a pudding. A good finish to the meal.
Metro Café is the place to go for the pasta, to order anything else would be ridiculous. The Face has done well to blend Mediterranean and Italian dishes together to make some, I would venture, award winning dishes. This trip to Metro Café has made me wonder why eat noodles when you can get “wow” factor pasta in Beijing!

Metro Café
9 Gongti Xilu,
Gongti
工体西路9号
6552-7828