Vivo 53 sits on the ground floor of The Tower, where many restaurants, including the wonderful Vault, have come and gone. Vivo 53, with its bold color scheme, is much brighter and welcoming than its immediate predecessor, The Tower Restaurant & Speakeasy. (Unfortunately, the charming basement lounge space, with its slightly precarious staircase, is gone, reverted back to storage.) Vivo 53’s fancy pizza and pasta on a recent lunch visit were a mixed bag. Some of the dishes were well-conceived and -executed while others? Not so much.
The service for my table of three was also a little out to lunch. Our waitress was friendly and polite but perhaps in need of a training refresher. We asked about the items listed on the chalkboard near the entrance: “Are those the specials?”
“News to me,” she said before dutifully turning around and returning a few minutes later to report that the chalkboard items weren’t specials but regular-menu items that the chef wanted to highlight.
The menu was no help. It’s written partially in Italian. Thankfully but oddly, the placemats are bordered with common Italian kitchen phrases and words to assist the non-Italian-speaking diners (a.k.a. presumably all of Fort Worth). Some of the ingredients are listed, but how most of the dishes are prepared and what they contain is either hard to decipher or nonexistent.
Take the salumi board, featuring several meats chosen at the chef’s discretion. Our server merely plopped the appetizer onto our table unceremoniously and scampered away, leaving us to guess what we were about to eat. There was a spicy prosciutto, a flavorful salami, and a soft, light-pink meat that we guessed was ham. The board came with grana padano (a mild, parmesan-like cheese), some adorable house-made pickles, and crostini. The prosciutto, salami, and cheese were winners. The ham stayed on the board.
Another starter, the roasted cauliflower was pleasant, even if the just slightly past al dente veggie was a little difficult to cut and eat. The accompanying rosemary yogurt dipping sauce had enough garlic to ward off a flock of vampires.
The wood-fired pizza oven is front and center as you walk in, and what comes out of it is worth going out of your way for. Toppings and styles range from standard (margherita, pepperoni) to interesting veggie (fried kale, squash blossoms) to just plain interesting (fried egg with bacon, clams). The sausage-and-fennel pizza was a glorious mix of spicy meat, pickled peppers, and mozzarella, with a licorice kick. Blessedly, the pizza was cooked all the way through, and the crust was scrumptious: light and crispy with a substantial crunch.
The signature chopped salad was also delicious. Although you can customize it, it’s tasty as is: finely chopped iceberg, romaine, and radicchio lettuce with fresh mozzarella, salami, olives, sweet house-made red peppers, and an understated vinaigrette dressing. The intermingling of the bitter radicchio, sweet cheese, salty olives, and spicy salami was absolutely outstanding.
The rigatoni with San Marzano tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella looked way better than it tasted. Not that it was horrible. Not at all. It was just extremely basic, nothing that couldn’t have been whipped up at home. But served in a darling little red cassoulet pot with a lid, boy, did it look cute.
There were desserts on the menu, but our server didn’t even try to tempt us with any of them. Too bad because the torta fritta (donuts) and some of the other house-made treats sounded good.
Throughout the meal, we kept comparing our dishes with others elsewhere. The roasted cauliflower? Good, but Terra Mediterranean Grill’s is probably better. The salumi board? Solid, but the one at Grace is excellent (and the servers there will tell you what you’re about to eat).
But Vivo 53’s pizza and chopped salad? We had a hard time coming up with ones at other places that are better.
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Vivo 53
525 Taylor St, FW. 855-202-1370. 11am-9:30pm Sun-Thu, 11am-12am Fri-Sat. All major credit cards are accepted.
Vivo 53
Roasted cauliflower $ 8
Salumi board $12
Signature chopped salad $12
Rigatoni $13
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