Food Country Restaurant Reviews serving the Delaware Valley

Located in a small strip mall behind a gas station, Café Valentina isn’t easy to find. This small, somewhat cramped neighborhood Italian restaurant offers a casual atmosphere, with an intimate dining area in the front and a tiny bar in the back. The menu isn’t imaginative by any means, but features a nice selection of Italian standards, including pasta, pizza, veal, chicken, and seafood dishes. Jeff’s Take: Café Valentina is known for its delicious garlic bread, and deservedly so. Each table gets a serving of large, pillowy dinner rolls, drenched in extra virgin olive oil with fresh chopped garlic and a sprinkling of parsley. What makes it so good is that rather than serving the olive oil on the side, like most restaurants, the plated garlic bread at Café Valentina is already swimming in the olive oil and garlic, so the bread has gotten a chance to absorb the flavor. Despite the large size of the rolls, a second helping was necessary. For my entrée, I ordered the Veal Saltimbocca Roman...

Dome Restaurant and Bar, located in Hockessin , Delaware ’s Lantana Square , is the sister restaurant of Eclipse, located on Union Street in Wilmington . Both restaurants have a similar hip, modern feel, although Dome is much bigger than Eclipse, featuring a bigger bar area and outdoor dining, as well as another smaller room for private parties. Dome’s cuisine is d escribed as “urban American,” including steak, seafood, pizzas, salads, and sandwiches. Jeff’s Take: The appetizers we started off with—fried calamari, pork pot stickers, and the hummus plate—were for the most part good, but slightly flawed. The pork pot stickers featured traditional Asian-style fried pork dumplings in a sweet and sour ginger glaze. Dumplings are usually served with a saltier soy-vinegar sauce, but Dome went in the opposite direction with the sweet and sour. This mild sauce was tasty, but was overpowered by the stronger flavors of pork, scallions, and ginger in the dumplings. The fried calamari, which featu...

If one were to give an out-of-towner a tour of the best food Delaware has to offer, a stop at Capriotti’s is a must. This place serves some of the best hoagies in the area—and that includes Philadelphia, which is known for having the best hoagies anywhere. The original shop, located on Union Street in Wilmington, started serving up delicious hoagies over 30 years ago. Since then, Capriotti’s has expanded to more locations around the area, as well as across the country—as far as Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. Without a doubt, the star at Capriotti’s is the turkey. While most other delis continue to use processed turkey, Capriotti’s always uses freshly roasted, pulled turkey on its hoagies. You’ll never want regular deli turkey again. In addition to the standard turkey hoagie, Capriotti’s offers The Bobbie, a highly recommended mainstay at the shop, which includes turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and mayo. While Capriotti’s is most famous for its turkey hoagies, there are some other great ...

With a name like 2 Fat Guys, this restaurant sounded like it would do Food Country proud. This casual American eatery is located in Wellington Plaza, a small shopping center in Hockessin, Delaware (which also includes Okura, one of the better sushi places in the state). The interior is casual and unassuming, with a small, unpartitioned main dining room and an even smaller bar area in the back. A couple of flat screen TVs adorn the walls (showing The Simpsons and ESPN—nice). The menu is limited to standard American pub fare, so there’s nothing too creative here. The “Award-Winning Wings” are available with a variety of sauces: mild, hot, nuclear, poached pear & molasses BBQ, garlic butter, ginger Thai, and bourbon BBQ. We ordered some hot wings, expecting standard buffalo wing sauce. The buffalo wings we got, however, were covered in what was more like a sweet, milder BBQ sauce. The waiter clarified that this was 2 Fat Guys’ standard buffalo wing sauce. The sauce wasn’t bad, but it ...