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| - We stopped by Papa Del's to order pizza, but ended up opting for pasta instead since we didn't have the 40-60 minutes needed for it to bake. Pizza by the slice is not available after 3 (and we were there a little after on a Saturday). We were okay with that, but did not end up having a good visit.
First, the service. We had not been to the new location. There were lots of employees behind the carryout counter and a couple servers in the restaurant space. We decided it must be a "seat yourself" situation, so we sat down. When we'd sat for some time while servers walked around us without greeting us or taking our order, I got up and asked someone in the front area if we needed to notify someone that we'd taken a table. The young man at the entrance stand said yes, he was supposed to seat us. Now, my husband had seen him earlier in the restaurant area near our table. He was sitting in a chair pulled up to a booth with customers in it, chatting away -- he had been there and not up front when we walked in. From his chair in the restaurant area, he had watched us come in and seat ourselves. But when I asked him whether we could remain there, he said, no, there were no servers assigned to that table. He asked us to move to another room in the restaurant, which we did.
Second, the food. We had an okay server (disorganized but well-intentioned) at our table for three, so things were looking up. We ordered mozzarella sticks, 2 salads (Italian for an up-charge and American) and fries as our sides, and 3 orders of pasta with meat sauce and meatballs with garlic bread (for an up-charge).
The mozzarella sticks are probably from a frozen bag of sticks, but they tasted good enough (by the time we got them, they'd cooled too much -- they weren't gooey any longer, unfortunately). The marinara with them was tasty. The salads and their dressings were fresh and delicious. They were generous in size, too.
The garlic bread was decent (although soggy because of the pasta water -- see below). The bread was fairly low quality, but it was crisped and the garlic butter on it was plentiful and tasty. The fries (our third side dish) never arrived.
The Pasta -- Not Recommended
The pasta was bad. Very bad. As the server carried plates of pasta toward us, there was so much water on the plates that it was slopping onto the floor. Some of it went down her front. She was apologizing and trying to level the plates so they wouldn't slop reddish water onto the table. She thought the water was coming from the meat sauce. It wasn't. It was clear to any good home cook that the pasta (the spaghetti and mostaccioli) had not been drained nearly enough.
The garlic bread (which, again, we'd paid extra for) was sitting in a pool of water on each plate, soaking it up. I immediately saved my bread by taking it off the plate and began soaking up the water with a napkin. It took two big napkins to soak most of the pasta water up on my plate alone.
We'd asked for the noodles to be cooked el dente. They were almost all the way soft -- not chewy at all. If the pasta had been cooked even a minute longer, I wouldn't have been able to eat it (soft pasta really grosses me out). The pasta was your regular dried pasta, and not of a high quality semolina, either. It's your garden-variety grocery store pasta (think Creamette).
The pasta sauce was not sticking to the noodles, leading us to believe that the pasta had probably been rinsed so that no starch coating remained to cling to the sauce. Of course, the extra water still on the pasta might have also caused this. The pasta had no flavor; we also don't believe the water in which it was cooked had been salted.
There was also too little sauce for the amount of pasta. And, it was not a slow-cooked meat sauce, but a marinara sauce with meat added to it. When I see "meat sauce" on an Italian-American menu, I expect red gravy with meat, long simmered, not some kind of cobbled together crushed tomato from a can with meat sauteed and added.
The three meatballs were of decent size and might have been house-made. We weren't sure, because they had so much filler in them (the ratio of meat to breadcrumb was low). My homemade meatballs are much better. My husband did not finish two of his meatballs, because he also did not like the taste (more dried herb than meat, with a bit of bitter garlic in the mix). We brought them home for our puppies.
A manager came to apologize after our meal (I'd asked the server to speak with him but to wait until we finished eating). He said he had had a talk with the line cooks (and I agree the worst problems were due to poor technique and lack of care / quality control in the kitchen). However, he did not offer to reduce our bill or provide a dessert or other compensation for the experience.
The best part of our experience was the air conditioning. It was a hot day and the space was pleasantly cool.
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