| rev:text
| - I will preface this review by saying that I'm of Italian descent, so I'm probably pickier than others might be, but this place is abysmally mediocre.
We arrived for an early reservation during Restaurant Week. The dearth of spots to choose from meant that it had to be busy/good, right? Nope! We entered the restaurant to be greeted with a strange fishy smell. After waiting several minutes for the hostess to lead us to our table, we were seated in a spot with a LOVELY view of the kitchen. Now, I'm not so bougie that I'll cast aspersions at being seated by the kitchen, but this ended up being significant only because I could hear a waiter or chef (not sure) loudly berating other employees back there. Family fun! The interior of the restaurant looks like it's seen better days, with crumbling paint here and there.
I was unimpressed with the cocktails list (just kinda basic stuff, nothing that the restaurant had created on its own), so we stuck with sparkling water.
Standard bread and pesto were brought out.
First course was beef carpaccio for me. It was pleasant enough, but you can't really mess up carpaccio seeing as how it's served RAW. The parmesan on it was served in giant chunks instead of being cut thin, but whatever. My wife's tuna carpaccio, on the other hand, was a mess, and it was suspiciously missing the olives that the menu had listed.
For the entree, I was afraid the filet would be mediocre (very glad now that I didn't order it), so I went with the penne alla Norma (penne served with eggplant, tomatoes, and ricotta). It had maybe three small tomatoes in it. The eggplant was mushy. The ricotta was just dumped all over the top like someone had just given up. Sauce was bland and tasteless. The penne itself had an extremely inconsistent temperature...parts of it were hot, while other sections were lukewarm to cold. If this is truly pasta that's made in-house, I don't see how that's possible. The whole dish was just not great...it could've used something to brighten up the flavors (olives, maybe); instead, it felt plodding to eat it. My wife had the lobster squid ink ravioli with a pasta sauce that was completely incongruous with the rest of the dish. She also was picking out seafood tails here and there.
Well, we carried on with dessert. I got the cheesecake, which was crumbly and not particularly flavorful. The ice cream that accompanied it was better. We were given free glasses of limoncello, so...I guess that's good.
This was not an $80 meal. This should have been closer to Olive Garden prices because it was nearly Olive Garden quality.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)