Ristorante Casa Mia

My house, in the middle of the street. Wood Green Road, to be precise. And it’s here in the market town of Wednesbury, part of the massive conurbation stretching northwest from Birmingham to Walsall and Wolverhampton, that Ristorante Casa Mia has made a home. It’s here, close to the intersection with the Anglo-Saxon-sounding Woden Road East that Ristorante Casa Mia dishes out its sunkissed Mediterranean and Italian cuisine in elegant, red and velvety surrounds.

For many of the residents of Wednesbury and nearby Walsall, Ristorante Casa Mia is quite literally a home away from home. Regulars like to make their way to this Mediterranean and Italian restaurant’s Wood Green Road premises to while away the hours over basketed bottles of Chianti, shared platters of antipasti, even the odd jug or two of homemade Sangria. Ristorante Casa Mia’s modus operandi is pan-Mediterranean, and that goes for pan-fried fish dishes like the cod with garlic in a cream sauce.

Other blindingly good options on Ristorante Casa Mia’s regularly changed menu (they use a whiteboard to, as it were, chalk up their specials – a platform that makes for easy erasure and revision) include the mussels soused in white wine and tomato sauce, stuffed vine leaves, homemade fish cakes with a sweet chilli sauce, and homemade pate. But that’s just for starters. The real stars of the show, those which bring diners into this Wednesbury restaurant from as far as Walsall, are the ribeye steaks dripping with melted blue cheese and port wine sauce, the venison topped with pate and Madeira wine sauce, and the fillet steak with scallops and king prawns, steeped in Metaxa brandy and a touch of Pernod. A drunken trio that makes for good gastronomy.