My wife and I spent a night in Paducah, KY on our way home from our Florida vacation last year. We were sort of enamored with the downtown area with its shops and restaurants and we made a plan to go back to Paducah for a couple days at some point. When we planned our trip to and from the Great Smoky Mountains earlier this year, we booked a couple nights in Paducah to try a couple restaurants in the area. One place we passed by when we were walking around on our first visit was a little Italian restaurant - Cynthia's Ristorante. It looked quaint and interesting and we made a note to go to there on our next visit. Well, this was our next visit so we made reservations for two on a Friday night.
Bill Gardner grew up in Paducah around good cooks. His grandmother and his mother were good cooks and his aunt owned a catering business in the area. Bill went off to the University of Kentucky and started to work in a fine dining restaurant that featured upscale food served by waiters in tuxedos. It was there that Bill Gardner decided he wanted to be a chef.
Gardner eventually ended up in Nashville to work at a restaurant there and he met Cynthia who worked at the same restaurant. Bill told Cynthia of his dream of becoming a chef, and with her support and with the help of his old boss from Lexington he was accepted into the California Culinary Academy, a Le Cordon Bleu-owned school in San Francisco. After graduating there, Bill and Cynthia worked in restaurants in Georgia, Florida and Missouri.
Bill was supposed to spend a year in Italy working in an upscale restaurant and learning the art of Italian cuisine. But the long distance between Cynthia and Italy was too great for Bill to handle. He ended up coming back to the States, and two weeks later Cynthia and he were married. The Gardners moved back to Paducah to be near his aging mother and he decided to open a restaurant there. With the support of mentor chefs he'd worked with or studied under along the way, he had the confidence that he could make great food. The only question was - would the people of Paducah accept his European-style of cooking? Paducah was a fried food and barbecue kind of town and Bill knew that he would have an uphill climb to get people accept his type of cooking.
In 1993, the Gardners rented a small building in the historic Market House Square and opened Cynthia's Ristorante. The restaurant only had 12 tables, but business was good for the Gardner's. It was so good that when the larger space next door became available, they moved in there. That is the current location of Cynthia's Ristorante. (see map)
We made reservations at Cynthia's for 7:30 that particular Friday evening. We were greeted at the host stand just inside the door and shown to a linen-topped table in the middle of the restaurant and given menus. The space was elegant with a small bar up front. The light was very low in the place making it difficult to read the menu or to take good shots with the camera. There was an upstairs to Cynthia's and I don't know if that was for larger groups or for overflow dining. It may have been a little of both. Given that Paducah is not a big town, the locals seated at the bar and at tables near us were checking out the two strangers from out of town with quick glances in our direction. Actually, we thought it was pretty funny and somewhat understandable.
Our server for the evening, Adam, came over to greet us. He had a down-home demeanor and a quick wit. He saw me using my flashlight on my phone to read the menu in the darkened restaurant and he made a comment along the lines of, "You'd think we'd turn up the lights to let people see what they're eating. But we have to save money on electricity around here." We immediately liked him.
Bill Gardner specializes in making foods with the freshest ingredients using as much locally raised food and produce that he can get. The menu changes depending upon availability of products and they feature nightly specials. Cynthia's features a short, but respectable wine list with prices that I felt were tad high, but nothing outrageous. I got a glass of the Earthquake cabernet from the Micheal David winery outside of Lodi, CA. Cindy got a glass of the DeLoach chardonnay, one of our favorite wineries from the Russian River Valley of Northern California.
After sharing a Caesar's salad, Adam brought out the food we ordered that particular evening. Cindy got the grilled Prince Edward Island scallops placed on a bed of house-made Pappardelle pasta mixed together with an herbed cream sauce and sliced fresh mushrooms. I was sort of surprised she ordered this because she doesn't care for mushrooms all that much. But she's gotten to a point that if they're fresh and not out of a can she can tolerate them.
I contemplated getting chicken saltimbocca - an organically-raised chicken breast that's pounded flat, pan-fried and topped with sage and prosciutto and served over a bed of fettuccine noodles and finished with a mushroom/veal wine sauce. But one of the specials Adam told us about - the rigatoni mixed with Italian sausage in a tomato cream sauce with red pepper flakes - kept calling my name. I was torn about the two and Adam talked me into the rigatoni. "You can always come back and the chicken saltimbocca. It's a regular item on the menu," he said.
And I was not unhappy with the rigatoni. It had great flavor and enough spiciness to get my attention. It featured small chunks of spicy Italian sausage that tasted great. The tomato cream sauce was light and a great overall complement to the dish. This was simply an outstanding pasta offering.
Cindy couldn't rave enough about her PEI scallops and the pasta in the cream sauce. She let me have a bite of the pappardelle pasta with a couple fresh mushrooms slices and it was exquisite. We were both overly happy with what we got and I didn't regret not getting the chicken saltimbocca in the least.
After dinner, Adam enticed us with some of the dessert selections they featured at Cynthia's. We settled on the tiramisu. While the presentation was nice, the tiramisu was a little dry with an uneven taste to it. While it didn't detract from the scrumptious meal we had, it wasn't quite what we were looking for as a finish to our evening at Cynthia's.
While the dessert wasn't up to the level of the food, I can't find much to say bad - if anything - about our experience at Cynthia's Ristorante. About the only thing would be that it was pretty dark in there and they could brighten the lights in the dining room a notch or two without spoiling the aura of the place. Our entrees were excellent, the service was friendly, down-home and efficient, and the ambience and atmosphere of the restaurant was relaxed and peaceful - even with the locals continually stealing looks our way to see who the two strangers were. We were simply amazed that this type of meal was available in Paducah, KY. This was a meal that was worthy in any large city we've traveled to.
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