Recently Awarded 2010 the Open Table Diners’ Choice Award
Basil T’s Restaurant of Red Bank: Where Fresh is Fresh
Basil T’s, Where Fresh is Fresh, and Homemade is Really Homemade. To us, it’s much more than a slogan, and more like a defining statement of our entire restaurant. The catch phrase for Olive Garden is “When you’re here, you’re family.” Despite the pleasant message of a welcoming dining environment, when you’re there, you aren’t literally family. Olive Garden isn’t going to send you a card on your birthday or expect an invitation to your wedding. But at Basil T’s, we follow our slogan to the T (pun intended).
If you walk into the kitchen of our Italian restaurant in NJ, you won’t see any bags of pasta, but you might spot bags of flour. That’s because we make all our pasta, from scratch, in house. We make the dough, we cut the rigatoni, we ruffle the pappardelle. Doing this adds a unique freshness and authentic taste to all of our pasta dishes we serve at our NJ restaurant.
Walk around a little more, and you’ll see tomatoes. Lots and lots of tomatoes. Here in the Garden State, we take advantage of the abundance and freshness of our state vegetable, the Jersey Tomato. We purchase all our tomatoes from local farms whenever they are in season and are proud to say that Jersey tomatoes make some of the best Pomodoro sauce around. All our tomatoes are ripened in our NJ restaurant for the juiciest, most flavorful taste possible. Many places will use tomatoes as soon as they receive them, but we know you can’t rush perfection.
Jersey tomatoes aren’t the only seasonal ingredients we include in our menu. We carefully select every element of every dish, and compliment our menu with items like dandelion greens, broccoli rabe, ramps, wild mushrooms, fava beans, watermelons, cantaloupe, apples during their peak of freshness and seasonality. We also only use fresh, never frozen hand-cuts of seasonal fish, and avoid farm raised seafood products as we believe the quality and taste are sacrificed.
After you’ve had the homemade pasta topped with the homemade sauce, you’ll probably want to wash it all down with, you guessed it, our homemade beer. (Our gold medal, award winning, homemade beer to be precise.) With five deliciously distinct styles and our many seasonal brews, there’s a beer for every taste and a Sampler if you’d rather taste every beer from our Red Bank brewery.
Last but certainly not least, is dessert (if you’ve managed to save room for it) made by our own pastry chef. Our house made pastries are inspired by authentically Italian recipes from places like Attanasio Pastry Shop in Naples, birthplace of the Sfogliatella. Basil T’s owner Victor Rallo wanted to make sure our recipe was authentic as possible, so he dropped in on the kitchen of Attanasio on his last trip to Naples.
At Basil T’s, we have a passion for everything we serve. Our approach to dining embraces the entire spectrum of fresh and homemade in order to bring that passion to you. That’s why when we say fresh and homemade, we mean Fresh and Homemade!
