Cugino Forno

Located at 1160 Revolution Mills Drive in Greensboro, Cugino Forno serves pizza salads, and desserts from 11-9 seven days per week. Beer and wine are available.

Greensboro needed another pizza place about as much as it needs another burger bar, but when Cugino Forno opened at Revolution Mills last month, it still managed to bring something different to the table. The pizza here is Neapolitan-style (San Marzano tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella) made with imported ingredients and cooked in a wood-fired oven in an open kitchen replete with dough-tossing. The provenance and showmanship set Cugino Forno apart, but there are still a few drawbacks to eating here.

First, don’t expect to eat in comfort. Seating here is picnic-style with long tables and benches. There is enough of it to go around – Cugino Forno is deceptively deep – but you’ll likely be squeezing yourself in among strangers. It also gets quite loud here, a product of both volume and acoustics.

In keeping with the strange set-up, the ordering system is also unusual for a place of this size. You place your order at the front counter, pre-pay, take a number, and place it at your table. In a smaller establishment, this wouldn’t be reason for concern, but I can only imagine how much walking and searching Cugino Forno’s servers do on a daily basis.

Next, don’t expect a lot of flexibility here. There are ten large pizza options with no half-toppings, substitutions, or single slices available. Salads, which can easily feed two, are also one size only.

If you can deal with the above, however, the food acquits itself reasonably well. My wife and I went for the Verona salad (spring mix, apricot sauce, bleu cheese, blueberries, and honey glazed pecans) and the Calabrese pizza (spicy salami, Calabrian peppers, mozzarella, and sauce). The wait time for the salad was minimal (the same cannot be said for the pizza, but they were busy), and it exceeded expectations. The sharpness of the bleu cheese balanced the sweetness of the fruit nicely, and the dressing was addictive. Once it arrived, the pizza offered fresh-tasting toppings, flavorful and acidic sauce, and plenty of heat from the salami and peppers. However, while there was plenty of taste up top, the crust was rather bland.

The pricing, for the quantity of the food and quality of the ingredients, left little room for argument. The (large) pizzas averaged $16 while the (also large) salads ran from $6-$8.

All told, Cugino Forno is worth a stop simply because you may not have had pizza like this before. But unless you can easily forgive the noise, seating, and lackluster crust, it’s unlikely to unseat your favorite pizza place.

7.5/10

Melt Kitchen and Bar

Located at 2270 Golden Gate Drive and at 1941 New Garden Road in Greensboro, Melt specializes in paninis but also offers burgers, salads, soups, starters, and sides six days per week (closed Sundays). There is a full-service bar with daily drink specials and rotating featured burgers and soups. This review covers the New Garden location.

It is not uncommon for restaurants to struggle with issues of identity. They may advertise a concept without fully realizing it or blend multiple incongruous visions. Melt decidedly does not have this problem. It is exactly what it presents itself to be – a dressed-up sandwich bar – and it does a damn good job of being it.

Melt’s recently-opened New Garden location is an attractive space with stone walls, a classic chalkboard menu behind the bar, and plenty of natural light. There is a long table for groups as well as what seemed like enough conventional tables. The chairs at the high-top tables are hard and uncomfortable though, so avoid them if you can.

Melt’s menu has no shortage of tantalizing panini options, including a Cuban Reuben (pretty much what it sounds like) and The Granny (turkey, Granny Smith apples, brie, and bacon onion jam). For our first time up, however, my wife and I opted for the Port City (portabella, artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers, mozzarella, and arugula with a red pepper aioli) and the soup-of-the-day pork pozole and the Duck Club (duck confit, prosciutto, gouda, caramelized onions, and arugula with an apricot thyme jam), respectively, preceded by a white bean hummus starter.

The food was bursting with flavor and largely very well-executed. The hummus delivered turmeric and cumin notes and was welcomingly accompanied by oven-hot naan. The pozole, though marred by a very fatty piece of pork, was still compellingly rich and smoky, and the fries were savory and crisp. Speaking of crispiness, both of the paninis were prepared perfectly: browned enough to preclude sogginess but not to the point of burning or drying out the toppings. The Port City featured some fresh-tasting veggies that played well with one another while the Duck Club, which had the potential to be overly salty, was thankfully not. The sauces are served on the side as dips here, but the apricot jam was so good that I would have gladly slathered it all over the sandwich.

There are two schools of thought as far as Melt’s pricing goes. The first is to look at the $10 to $14 for a panini and a side and declare that entirely too high for a mere sandwich. The second, and the one to which I subscribe, is to consider the taste, execution, and large portion sizes and consider it a worthwhile expenditure. Add to that friendly service – Ayeza nearly talked me into trying Brussel sprouts, which I typically loathe -  and a quick and efficient kitchen and it feels even more like money well-spent.

In lesser hands, Melt could have easily been just another one-trick gimmick eatery. But by offering flavorful and filling food done right, it instead reads like a concept executed to its fullest potential.

8/10

Ill Will

Dustin Tillman is a recently widowed Cleveland-area psychologist who uses hypnotism to treat patients. Thirty years ago, Dustin’s parents were murdered, and his adopted brother Rusty was convicted based on Dustin and his cousin Kate’s testimony. Now Rusty has been exonerated and released, and Dustin fears that Rusty might want revenge. To add to his worries, his patient-turned-friend, ex-cop Aquil, suspects that a serial killer is murdering young men in the area and staging their deaths to look like accidents, and he wants Dustin to validate his hypothesis. Meanwhile, Aaron, Dustin’s heroin-using teenage son makes contact with Rusty and finds himself drawn into Aquil’s investigation, all while learning some very unsettling family history.

Dan Chaon’s latest novel is a character study in a thriller’s skin. It is creepy, suspenseful, and unsettling while also offering a multifaceted exploration of its complex and deeply flawed protagonists.

Chaon achieves this by balancing multiple perspectives. If frequent POV changes irk you as a reader, this is not the novel for you. The viewpoint fluctuates not only between Dustin, his son, and his cousins but also between past and present and between conventional narration and an epistolary form. Through these multiple vantage points, Chaon is able to successfully shade his characters and alter readers’ perceptions of them. For example, in the segments he narrates in the present, Dustin comes across as unfortunate and put-upon, forever unable to finish his sentences as friends and patients besiege him with their problems. But through Aaron’s eyes, he comes across as out-of-touch and a bit pathetic. Meanwhile, Kate and her twin sister’s segments show him to be extremely naïve as a child, and his own way, more off-putting than Rusty, whose bad-boy image and all-for-show mock-embrace of Satanism made him a likely suspect when family members turned up dead.

These shifts in perspective and perception work well to advance the idea that memory is malleable. Therein lies the book’s true horror: the notion that those who are privy to monstrous truths may not be able to honestly recollect them. Chaon uses the 1980s Satanic ritual abuse panic as an entry point for fleshing out this theme, and while that occupies an important place in the backstory, it is otherwise underplayed. Considering how many people were maligned by the fantasies of prosecutors and social workers and considering how forgotten the panic is today, it really could have benefitted from more emphasis here.

In place of that Chaon, who is capable of writing tightly controlled prose when the mood strikes him, too often lets his writing become self-indulgent. Between disjointed journal entries, drug-fueled musings, and a lot of distractingly unorthodox typography, there is too much here that, while stylistically distinct, contributes precious little and undermines the book’s otherwise-excellent tension. Moreover, Ill Will builds toward a conclusion that is as contrived as it is unsatisfying.

Though Chaon’s rich characterization and skillful treatment of tension and theme can’t mask all of the novel’s shortcomings, Ill Will is still two-thirds of a good read and worthwhile for its treatment of memory alone.

7.75/10

Iron Fist

Fifteen years after he was presumed dead in a plane crash, Danny Rand (Finn Jones), the son of a wealthy industrialist, returned to New York City. He finds his father’s company in the hands of childhood friends Ward (Tom Pelphrey) and Joy (Jessica Stroup) Meachum, who don’t believe that Danny is who he says he is. Homeless, Danny falls in with martial arts instructor Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick). Danny has significant martial arts skills of his own, having been saved from the plane crash and raised by the warrior-monks of K’un-Lun. He eventually became their protector, the immortal Iron Fist, but he abandoned his post to seek answers and avenge his parents. Unfortunately, K’un-Lun isn’t done with him yet: the monks want him back, and their sworn enemy, The Hand, is not only in New York but is using Rand Enterprises as a front.

Given both its early negative reviews and the acclaim (rightfully) garnered by Marvel’s other Netflix series, I expected Iron Fist to be a victim of Godfather III Syndrome: a perfectly decent work is undeservingly loathed for failing to reach the lofty heights of its predecessors. And while it is safe to say that debuting after Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage didn’t do Iron Fist any favors, the show is still quite flawed – though hardly unwatchably so – in its own right.

A large part of the problem comes from showrunner Scott Buck’s lack of a unique vision. Whereas Jessica Jones and Luke Cage managed to be topical and Daredevil got by on its visceral aesthetics and dark ambiance, Iron Fist simply fails to stand out. At times, it plays like Marvel’s take on DC’s Arrow with Danny, the Meachums, and The Hand standing in for Oliver Queen, the Merlyns, and The League of Assassins, respectively. There is tension and duplicity built into that, but aside from more mystical shadings (though not to the extent of Doctor Strange), not much originality.

Much of a stink was raised about the casting of Finn Jones as a (white in the source material) martial artist, and while that is something of a dated trope (paging the ghost of David Carradine), casting an Asian-American in the role would invite its own set (stereotyping much?) of concerns. Besides, the casting as a whole is eyebrow-raising, with Japanese-named sensei Bakuto portrayed by Puerto Rican Ramon Rodriguez and Korean-American and Indian-British actors playing father and son. Back to Jones for a moment: there is still something off-putting about his work here. Danny comes across as both nice-guy affable and incredibly disrespectful of personal boundaries, as both dedicated to the principle justice and selflishly in pursuit of personal goals, as both angsty and zen. Complex characterization is generally a positive, but Rand is all over the map. Add to that David Wenham’s B-grade Norman Osbourne impersonation as faux-sincere corporate cutthroat Harold Meachum, and neither protagonist or antagonist is particularly magnetic.

Fortunately, the same cannot be said for all of the roles. Henwick gives Colleen both a hard edge and a guardedness that thankfully elevate her character well beyond “token love interest.” The Marvel Netflix universe’s favorite nurse/friend to all superheroes (a situation that is humorously lampshaded in this show), Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson), pops up here as well as one of Colleen’s students. She provides a welcome voice of reason in contrast to the zaniness around her.

Just as the acting is wildly uneven, so too are the action and pacing. Early episodes are slow with too much time spent on Danny trying to establish his provenance. The fight sequences in these earlier episodes are also unimpressive, especially compared to Daredevil’s now-infamous stairway battles. However, the pace does eventually pick up as Danny’s backstory is fleshed out, Colleen and Ward undergo character development, and The Hand’s menace increases. The fight sequences eventually get better too. Unfortunately, the action-laden final episode is marred by some laughably clichéd dialogue.

Aesthetically, the Iron Fist ability is depicted without looking too goofy: Danny’s fist glows when he harnesses his chi. It easily could have turned out worse. While the score and soundtrack here can’t compare to that of Luke Cage, composer Trevor Morris puts in respectable work. Still, the absence of Motorhead’s “Iron Fist” is sorely felt.

Given what Marvel has been able to do with lesser-known and less respected characters, Iron Fist’s status as a B-list hero is no excuse for a subpar product. Functionally, Iron Fist works as a conduit to The Defenders, and one can only hope that Danny, freed from Buck’s influence, will be more compelling in an ensemble. Viewed solely on its own terms, Iron Fist offers flashes of entertainment and exhilaration as well as some intriguing supporting characters but also a whole lot of uninspired mediocrity.

6.75/10