rev:text
| - Carmella's is extremely difficult to describe, being a study in contrasts or a jumble of mismatched concepts, depending on your point of view. Start with the name. If the restaurant has 'pints' in its name, Carmella, pure Italian, doesn't fit. It needs an Irish woman's name like Megan or Sinead.
Next, the decor is an uncomfortable blend of mounted antlered animal heads from a hunting lodge and 1950s photographs and knickknacks from an old Italian grandmother's kitchen. Pretty strange.
The menu is very limited with only a single burger, scallops, pasta, fish, chicken, and steak offering. We split a wedge salad and chose the chicken and pasta entrees. The food was pretty good, although the chicken was a little over cooked and my pasta portion, while just right for me, might be disappointingly small for many American diners. Prices were quite reasonable.
We had good Moscow mules and a bottle of Chardonnay. That brings me to the final mismatch, the wine. The wine list includes very few moderately priced items. There are many interesting, higher priced wines that would be more suitable for a more upscale restaurant. Furthermore, one of the reasons we came on a Monday was to take advantage of the half price wine promotion. However, it applies only to wines under $50, which are almost nonexistent. With the assistance of our excellent server we found a way to participate.
Service was outstanding even though there was a single server who had to cover the mostly empty restaurant and the outside tables.
Overall it was a pretty good experience and so I rounded up to 4*. The bar was large and attractive. Looks like a good place for a drink.
|