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| - I have been there for lunch. I used to be a happy customer of the restaurant, in the old Champaign location. They used to have good, homey, tasty food. Nothing of that is left, the memories barely.
My girlfriend tried a vegetable salad with tuna [not a tuna salad], as per the description. Of course, we expected a small piece of freshly cooked tuna. Instead, a couple of vegetables of debatable quality, topped with small pieces of fishy-smelling (MORE than fish is supposed to smell fishy anyway) disgusting tuna TAKEN FROM A CAN. Excuse me, a salad of EXPENSIVE RESTAURANT quality is not supposed to use 20 cents-worth ingredients.
My main dish was an EXPENSIVE seafood lasagna which, again, was one of the most execrable pieces of culinary garbage I've ever eaten in the wonderful Urbana-Champaign. Gee, an honest sandwich from Jimmy Johns is many degrees of magnitude better and healthier. The Great Impasta masterpiece was extremely salty, with cheap, salty - did I mention salty? - ingredients (again, small, cheap shrimps FROM A CAN), heavy on the cheap shrimp, with little of the other seafood spelled out in the menu detectable in the real dish. A heavy, unsavory, poorly cooked bechamel sauce that made me feel uneasy for the rest of the day. I don't consider myself an excellent cook, but I cook better than that, drunk.
I was brave and I ate part of my dish, because I was hungry. My stomach didn't thank me. My friend barely touched her salad, and returned it uneaten. The staff behaved as if nothing was wrong. A lot of money for food which is literally worse than the worst fast food I've ever eaten. Our stomachs were suffering... if you go to The Great Impasta make sure you've got stellar health insurance, you might need it.
When it comes to restaurant food, the rapport between high prices and execrable quality makes The Rotten Impasta a champion of bad taste, in more than one sense.
Bottom line: avoid like the plague.
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