Eat Local: Carelli’s of Boulder

Eat Local: Carelli’s of Boulder
by Douglas Brown on March 1, 2009

“Look,” said my wife, Annie, pointing across the room. “Oh, my God.” Waiter with 4-foot tall pepper mill. Flashback. 1981.

An unusually sensitive diner, one particular about contemporary approaches to restaurant design and menu development, the kind of customer who shrinks from things that snarky bloggers might ridicule, would feel uncomfortable in Carelli’s, an Italian restaurant in Boulder.

There’s the pepper mill, of course. But the industrial tablecloths and wine glasses, the kind of chairs you get in banquet halls or country-club luncheonettes with names like “The 19th Hole,” also would unsettle the sensitive diner. The garlic bread — slabs of cotton-soft “Italian” bread saturated with oil, robed in garlic and oregano — would remind the sensitive diner of meals he ate with his parents in 1981 at that Italian place near the motel. This would startle the sensitive diner.

But you are not a sensitive diner, or at least you are not this sensitive diner. You will go to Carelli’s and have a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, or chicken parmesan, or angel hair pasta with clams and a few glasses of wine.

The gigantic, round fireplace will please you; the copper lighting will warm you; the gee-whiz-happy staff will dare you to not enjoy yourself.

The University of Utah ski team might claim a big booth behind you, but they will be polite. They are from Utah.

The waitress, a college student, will not recite the point of origin of the ingredients that go into the specials, nor will she refer to topics such as the organic or free-range status of the eggs, whether the shrimp is “wild-caught” or the degree to which the pigs were treated humanely before they were slaughtered. And for this, you will be thankful.

People who live in Boulder and do not claim even tangential membership in the sensitive dining crowd have been telling you for years: “You’ve got to go to Carelli’s! It’s old-school. It’s real. It’s comfortable. It’s not pretentious. It’s so . . . odd . . . being in Boulder.”

– CARELLI’S OF BOULDER –

Italian. 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Monday-Friday. 4-11 p.m. Saturdays. Closed Sunday. 645 30th St., Boulder, 303-938-9300; carellis.com

– Douglas Brown