Muriale's

Muriale's Restaurant
1742 Fairmont Avenue
Fairmont, WV 26554-2038
(304) 363-3190

Perhaps the only reason I have not gotten around to reviewing Muriale's before now is that we eat there so often, it seems strange to me to think there is anyone who does NOT know of its yum-factor. While going through my pictures to find other restaurants I planned to review, I found these I took last summer.

One of Marion County's crown jewels, Muriale's opened its doors in 1969, and it is rare to dine there without seeing owner Rocco Muriale walking through the dining rooms and greeting customers, talking to customers, and making sure customer service is at the same high-quality level as the food being served.

I prefer to eat in the bar area, it's cozy and I enjoy the hominess of a fireplace and bookshelves filled with cookbooks. My husband also tends to like the sporting events playing on the large televisions in that room, volume turned off so as not to be completely obtrusive.

There are several things I love to order from Muriale's, the lasagna is the best I've ever eaten, anywhere, hands down. They have a fantastic chicken and asparagus salad (no longer on the menu but when I was there last time and asked for it, they prepared it for me). It was a beautifully grilled chicken breast served on a large bed of spinach and mixed greens, roasted red peppers and asparagus, along with a variety of olives topped with a lively lemon vinaigrette.

On this day, we started out with the signature house salad, with house dressing. My only complaint about their salad is the iceberg lettuce - Rocco, if you are reading this, please upgrade your lettuce! It comes with a single slice of pepperoni, some house-made pickled onions, a few jarred roasted red pepper strips, a green olive, a black olive and a hearty sprinkle of mozzarella cheese. I really like their house dressing, a simple olive oil and vinegar combination though I always ask for lemons and squeeze the juice on for extra acidity.

My favorite thing about Muriale's has to be their red sauce. It has such depth, and so many layers of flavor that try as I might I am unable to pinpoint all the ingredients that go into it, and I surely have failed at being able to recreate it. I tell my husband each time we eat there that if I knew how to make Muriale's sauce, we would never eat out at a restaurant again because I would want to make it all the time. We both ordered the meatball sandwich, and to my delight it came smothered in red sauce. I can tell you that not one drop of that sauce went to waste and it took great restraint not to just lick my plate, that's how good that sauce is people.

Several big, tender meatballs, sliced in half and, again, smothered in sauce between two thick slices of Italian bread. It really just doesn't get any more perfect. As you can see from the picture there was a little cheese sprinkled on, and I honestly can't remember if there was much cheese on the sandwich, but it doesn't matter because I didn't order it for the cheese, I ordered it for those meatballs.

Fries came on the side; steak fries, nicely browned and with cracked black pepper and a good fry to salt ratio, but really they were just a filler and I could have done without them.

Now whether we need it or not, we almost always order dessert. Usually, my game plan is to skip the pre-dinner Italian bread they bring out, and eat most of my salad. Then I eat half my lasagna (because I almost always order lasagna) and take the other half home so I will make sure to have enough room for dessert. While I've strayed a few times, with the almond torte and maybe one time the cannoli, I typically always get the tiramisu, and my husband always gets the peanut butter pie.

Every Italian restaurant serves a tiramisu and a "New York style" cheesecake, and most of these places get both delivered to their freezers. Muriale's makes their own, and it shines. The tiramisu is served in a parfait dish; its layers smooshed together, yet still discernible and delicious. I'd love to get a hold of whatever brand mascarpone they use because it is the creamiest I've ever had.

I have to apologize for the quality of the peanut butter pie picture. You see my husband is generally tolerant of waiting to eat his meal until after I have taken a picture of it, but I only get a few takes, especially when it comes to dessert, and it just happened I was allowed to get two pictures in before he chowed down, and both were slightly blurry. You can see though that the peanut butter pie has a thick filling loaded with chocolate chips and is covered in delicious chocolate ganache on a chocolate cookie crust. They drizzle it with caramel and chocolate and serve it with ice cream, I mean really how could they go wrong with that? As with the tiramisu, it is obviously made in-house.

To me, Muriale's is comforting and homey and I love to go there on rainy Sunday evenings when I miss my family or need some comfort food. If I had an Italian grandmother, I can imagine this is the food she would serve me, of course if I had an Italian grandmother who made that sauce I would have already stolen the recipe off of her.