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Nov 13, 2024

First Look: Boom Boom now serves belly-filling pasta portions at wallet-friendly prices (video) - syracuse.com

Lunch at Boom Boom Italiano in Onondaga. From left: Linguini with vodka sauce and a chicken cutlet, a large antipasto salad, and penne pasta with Sunday sauce and meatballs. (Charlie Miller |

Lunch at Boom Boom Italiano in Onondaga. From left: Linguini with vodka sauce and a chicken cutlet, a large antipasto salad, and penne pasta with Sunday sauce and meatballs. (Charlie Miller | [email protected])(Charlie Miller | [email protected])

(In First Look, we visit a new restaurant or bar in Central New York to give readers an idea of what to expect. If you know of a new place, email me at [email protected] or call/text me at 315-382-1984. If I take your suggestion, I just might buy you a meal.)

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Syracuse, N.Y. — In a city that rarely says no to seconds, Boom Boom Italiano just hit the Syracuse dining scene with a belly-shaking bang.

This old restaurant with a new concept will fill your stomach (and your fridge) with pounds of carb-loaded comfort while taking it easy on your wallet. It’s the kind of deal that we food lovers crave: big plates, bold flavors and leftovers for days.

Boom Boom Italiano is a temporary rebranding of Boom Boom Mex Mex on Howlett Hill Road in the Town of Onondaga. Tom and Lupe Bryan opened the eatery in 2005, and they would serve their burritos and tacos from March until October before returning to Mexico for the winters. Sean Lavin bought the restaurant in 2018 and kept Lupe’s original recipes, the big portions and seasonal approach.

Sean was fine taking a couple weeks off to re-energize after working non-stop through the summer, but most of his 35 employees had to find other jobs in the off-season. Some wouldn‘t come back. That gave him the idea of staying open all year but changing the concept. It’ll return to the Mexican menu in the spring.

“We don‘t have good Italian food on this side of town. You have to either go downtown or all the way to Skaneateles,” he said. “We are keeping the same cafeteria-style approach to serving Mexican food, but now we’re serving my family’s Italian recipes.”

Sean Lavin, the owner of Boom Boom Italiano in Onondaga. (Charlie Miller | [email protected])(Charlie Miller | [email protected])

After closing Mex Mex in October, restaurant manager Jodi Dubar and other staff redecorated the dining room. They hung photographs of Sean’s Italian relatives on the walls, strung lights across the ceiling and covered the tables with red and white tablecloths.

Sean’s aunt and head chef, Elizabeth Cottrell, created a static menu with quality ingredients that employees could serve quickly to lines of customers, similar to the lines that formed daily at Mex Mex.

The crew made it through a one-day soft opening for friends and family to get acclimated to the new concept. They opened to the public last Sunday and have faced a steady influx of customers since.

“It‘s blown up,” Sean said. “The regulars who come for Mexican came back, but we’ve gotten so many new customers who want good Italian food.”

The line to order can be intimidating, often reaching 20-plus deep. But it moves quickly. Once you reach the front, you will order, pay and walk away with your food in under four minutes.

Pick your meal: You have three portion options. The “bowl” ($12) includes pasta, sauce and locally baked Italian bread. A “meal” ($16) adds a small salad or a cup of homemade soup. The “feast” ($20) gets both soup and salad.

Dropping pasta into the hot water is the first step for your meal at Boom Boom Italiano in Onondaga. (Charlie Miller | [email protected])(Charlie Miller | [email protected])

Pick your pasta: You have your choice of linguini, penne, rigatoni or gluten-free penne, all imported from Italy. Batches of pasta are constantly boiled in the kitchen and placed in trays at the counter. When you order, the server drops a bowlful’s worth into a strainer and dunks it in boiling water for about 20 seconds.

The pasta is quickly strained and dumped into a 10-inch bowl.

Pick your sauce: Elizabeth spends roughly five hours preparing each of the four sauces. The marinara sauce, creamy alfredo and vodka sauces are all vegetarian.

After a flash boil, it's time to drop the vodka sauce onto the linguini at Boom Boom Italiano in Onondaga. (Charlie Miller | [email protected])(Charlie Miller | [email protected])

The traditional Sunday sauce (shown below) starts with browning housemade meatballs, sausage and chuck roast and added to a rich tomato sauce.

You can add your choice of meatballs, sausage, Italian beef, chicken cutlet or eggplant to your bowl for $3. You can get two for $5.

A bowl of penne pasta smothered with the Sunday sauce and meatballs from Boom Boom Italiano in Onondaga. (Charlie Miller | [email protected])(Charlie Miller | [email protected])

The chicken cutlets are the most popular meat addition so far. Elizabeth pounds fresh-not-frozen breast meat, dips it in seasoned bread crumbs, gives it an egg bath, rolls it in more crumbs and fries it to a deep brown finish.

Build your salad: Your server will quickly build you a salad from the antipasto bar. A small costs $5, a large is $12 and one designed to feed a family of four is $18.

You pick what you want along with your romaine lettuce. The toppings include salami, roasted red peppers, pepperoncini, olives, tuna, provolone cheese, chickpeas, hard-boiled egg and blue cheese.

A large antipasto salad from Boom Boom Italiano in Onondaga. (Charlie Miller | [email protected])(Charlie Miller | [email protected])

Fair warning: I ordered a “large” antipasto with everything on it plus the house Italian dressing. The salad alone was more than enough to feed two people in one sitting. In fact, I tried to replicate this salad at Wegmans over the weekend and it cost me more than $20.

Don’t forget dessert: Julia Klaczko, a server here for five years, was about to leave Boom Boom to go work in a bakery. She asked if she could bake some desserts for the restaurant.

A few days later, she returned with some cannoli, a pistachio churro cheesecake and some gluten-free desserts.

“I tried them all and just looked at her and said, ‘Julia, where the heck have you been hiding this? These are amazing,’“ Sean said. ”Her desserts are now flying off the shelves."

A slice of pistachio cannoli cheesecake at Boom Boom Italiano in Onondaga. (Charlie Miller | [email protected])(Charlie Miller | [email protected])

About 85% of Boom Boom’s customers order their food to go while the rest start their meals here at one of the 15 tables. Most of those inevitably return to the cashier and ask for to-go containers.

“People don’t always want to spend two hours and a fortune to eat dinner,” Sean said. “They’re coming here from work, dance recitals or school functions. They just want to go home and relax and have a good meal.”

He’s right, you know. My meal weighed 7 pounds, 2 ounces and cost $40. That’s $5.61 per pound. What’s more, Wednesday’s lunch stretched into Wednesday’s dinner for two and my Thursday late-night snack.

The venue: Boom Boom Italiano, 3263 Howlett Hill Road, Town of Onondaga. (315) 673-7166

Hours: 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily.

Reservations: Not necessary. You’ll have to wait in line, but it moves very quickly.

Parking: The restaurant has a large parking lot.

Credit cards: Yes.

Dietary options: They offer gluten-free pasta, desserts and other items.

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Charlie Miller finds the best in food, drinks and fun across Central New York. Contact him at (315) 382-1984, or by email at [email protected]. (AND he pays for what he and his guests eat and drink, just so you know.) You can also find him under @HoosierCuse on Twitter and on Instagram. Sign up for his weekly Where Syracuse Eats newsletter here.

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