Painted Lemon restaurant in Clifton Park good stop for pasta dishes

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It's hard to resist on of the signature pizzas at The Painted Lemon in Clifton Park: Quattro stagioni, with sliced ham, pepperoni, mushroom and artichoke anchoring each quarter.

The Clifton Country Road building went up in Clifton Park in 1997 to house The Conservatory Grill and has been home to many restaurants since.

The Painted Lemon in Clifton Park offers all-day dining in sunlit rooms.

Tender and tasty chicken Parm at The Painted Lemon in Clifton Park.

The airy interiors an expansive windows have attracted diners to a succession of Clifton Park restaurants over the past 25 years, the latest being The Painted Lemon.

Inexperienced and/or undertrained staff at The Painted Lemon in Clifton Park leads to service oversights including a smashed butter pat in the bread basket.

This is beet carpaccio from The Painted Lemon in Clifton Park, but you wouldn't know it at first glance.

If you’ve got room at the end of the meal at The Painted Lemon in Clifton Park, don't miss the limoncello-blueberry mascarpone cake.

Pasta with pears and Gorgonzola, top, and chicken Parm from The Painted Lemon in Clifton Park.

A mound of arugula tops pasta with shrimp in fettuccine alla Painted Lemon at The Painted Lemon in Clifton Park.

Pasta packets encase fruit and cheese in the pear and Gorgonzola fiochetti at The Painted Lemon in Clifton Park.

The Painted Lemon's pizza oven is a holdover from the previous occupant of the Clifton Park building, The Brick Oven Tavern and Grille.

Summer fun awaits on the deck over a pond, complete with its own bar, at The Painted Lemon in Clifton Park.

It's back to Clifton Park this week, not for a brewery, beefed-up hot dogs or a $30 burger, but to The Painted Lemon, a new Italian restaurant opened in January on Clifton Country Road and is a sibling to to the original in Sherman, Conn.

Most Clifton Park openings suggest dining at speed, a bite slurped before stretching or lunch on the fly. With ongoing construction my head snaps left and right, catching fluttering red banners announcing Koi Ramen, a new ramen-and-boba shop, and a now fully occupied strip where Blaze Pizza and Bare Blends flank Club Pilates and a dental office as neatly as Invisaligned teeth.

The Painted Lemon

Address: 54 Clifton Country Road, Clifton Park Hours: Noon to 10 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday. Closed Monday.Prices: Salads and starters, $15.95 to 17.95; secondi, $24.95 to $31.95; pasta, $17.95 to $26.95; kids’ menu, $7.95 to $12.95; desserts, $7.Info: 518-280-0843 and thepaintedlemonus.comEtc.: On-site parking lot. ADA-accessible.

So I’m taken by the bend in the road, a slow curve with a good view of The Painted Lemon overlooking a large pond where Canada geese trail wobbly goslings and a large deck with an outdoor bar in its midst promises fantastic summer vibes.

The spot has a long history as the former home of Zaika, Carmen's, Nicole's Bistro II, The Conservatory Grille and, more recently, The Brick Oven Tavern and Grille, which left behind its domed, gas-fired pizza oven in an arched corner of the space.

New owners Giovanni Iardazio and Kim Taylor, who also own two restaurants in Italy, bought up the Connecticut Painted Lemon, where Iardazio had been pizza chef and taught Neapolitan pizza making. Not surprisingly, the pizzas here are Neapolitan-style with blistered, airy crusts, good flavor in the dough and an ultra-thin, floppy center swept with marinara sauce. And while there are a dozen combinations, you’d be foolish not to share the quattro stagioni — a personal pizza with sliced ham, pepperoni, mushroom and artichoke anchoring each quarter.

There's one clear conclusion: The lemon theme has been taken to an extreme, with frilled lemon-print curtains and yellow-flowering faux ivy for the tall arched windows, plastic yellow platters, plates and bowls giving picnic flair, lemon-sole napkins in caterer's fans inside stemware and even the bill, printed on vivid yellow tape. A huge collection of Home Goods-style canvas lemon wall art depicting the citrus in various states of fullness or juicy wedges covers up the row of wall outlets left visible when The Brick Oven removed the booths’ wall-mounted TVs. It smells softly of gas, which we attribute to the chugging pizza oven and calls to mind a Florida social club, but the pasta is on point and the views are pretty.

As upstate as this feels, the pasta is marvelously al dente and not slick with oil. The strands of the fettuccine alla Painted Lemon are slightly underdone for extra-toothsome bites. True, for $27, you’ll register that it's a basic pesto pasta with a few sundried tomatoes in plump slivers and half a dozen fat shrimp cleanly deveined and admirably pneumatic. We’re happy, too, with a traditional pounded chicken Parmigiana swathed in mozzarella and house marinara sauce, the breast meat tender as veal, the penne cloaked in a thick, slow-stewed, basil-scented tomato sauce.

But the real thrill is in the pear and Gorgonzola fiochetti, a flotilla of snugly crimped parcels, like a tide of paper bags, in a delicate cream sauce. Put aside the potential funky ferocity of Gorgonzola cheese: This nails a perfect balance of understated sweetness, with soft diced pears happily adrift. Some might find the fresh pasta a shade — just a blip — underdone, but who can argue with pasta that has just enough resistance to stand up into the soft riches inside? The 518 has a slew of options for Italian, but only The Painted Lemon has a dish like this.

With the well-meaning efforts of a very young or very inexperienced staff, it's hard to look past service well below the food. Wine glasses are filled wobblingly high and plonked hard on tables; a bread basket with half-opened Sysco butter pats is deposited in my place setting as though solely for me, and scraped plates are left uncleared. Our table was a mosaic of shared plates, a pizza tray and an oversized melamine bowl holding a thick-cut beet carpaccio knuckle-deep under heaped arugula, making it more family salad bowl than a simple appetizer carpaccio plate. When two servers appeared with our entrees and I gently proposed they might need to clear the jammed table, they stared wide-eyed and asked what to do with the plates. One option might have been to pop them on an empty table, but they hurried away. A newly dispatched server asked if we wanted our table cleared before motioning at us like air traffic control to hand him every plate.

The Painted Lemon rests unabashedly on its country, lemon kitsch and al-dente pasta, perhaps made by a secret nonna in the kitchen. What it lacks in refined service, it makes up for in generous portions, with great fistfuls of fresh arugula topping pastas, and all-day hours for lunch or happy-hour drinks on the deck. Although the four cocktails on the menu are still "Specialty Winter" drinks and the house wines skew basic from a Placido Chianti that retails for $8 to a $6 Yellow Tail Moscato, you can surely picture yourself with a cold CK Mondavi sauvignon blanc and grill-blackened calamari with arugula and lemon wedges, as simple as it would be from the Amalfi to Calabrian coast. If you have room for a dessert, make it the housemade limoncello-blueberry mascarpone cake, an absurdly oversized wedge that feeds three.