Lou Carbone will tell you, without any particular pride, that he has eaten at Nino’s Italian Restaurant on Port St. Lucie Boulevard roughly every Thursday night since 2013. He missed two weeks when his wife had knee surgery. That’s it. He is not unusual among the regulars here, which should tell you something.
Nino’s is the kind of place that PSL doesn’t advertise about itself, partly because the people who go there don’t feel like sharing. It sits in a strip plaza off Port St. Lucie Boulevard, the sort of location that makes food critics write things off before they’ve even parked. The sign is old. The décor inside runs toward red-checkered tablecloths and candles in glass holders that have seen better decades. If that bothers you, the food will not be enough to bring you around anyway.
Lou orders the same thing most weeks: baked ziti with sausage and a cup of the wedding soup. He will occasionally deviate for the veal marsala if he’s had a good week, which he describes as a personal reward system he developed after retirement. His wife Elena usually gets the eggplant parmigiana, which she considers the fairest test of any Italian kitchen. Nino’s, she says, passes.
The portions here are not performative. They’re just large. The lasagna — a full brick of the thing, not some architectural slice — runs around fifteen dollars and comes with bread and a salad. The linguine with clam sauce is briny and garlicky in a way that suggests someone in the kitchen actually tastes it. The pizza, which some people overlook because they assume a sit-down Italian place can’t do pizza, is worth ordering. Thin-ish crust, real sauce, nothing fancy.
Service is family-run and has been for years, which produces the particular warmth of people who actually recognize faces. Lou doesn’t have to order. This would annoy most people; he considers it one of life’s finer perks. The staff remembers that Elena doesn’t want extra cheese on anything, which is the kind of detail that earns loyalty nobody talks about in reviews.
Thursday nights tend to fill up by seven, so if you’re not a regular with a standing implicit reservation, earlier is smarter. Weekend nights get loud in a good way — big tables, families, the occasional birthday with a candle in the tiramisu. Lunch is quieter and the specials are worth asking about.
Dinner for two with a glass of wine each lands somewhere around forty to fifty dollars, which in 2024 makes Nino’s feel almost aggressively reasonable. It is not a trendy restaurant. It is not trying to be. The chef is not interested in your opinion of the plating.
Lou, asked why he keeps coming back, shrugs in the way that men of a certain generation shrug when they think the answer is obvious. “The food’s good and they know my name,” he says. “What else do you want from a Thursday?” He has a point, honestly. Not every restaurant needs to be more than that.
