An Akron Institution For Eighty-One Years

About a month ago, friend and fellow food blogger Kathy from Carano's Cucina and I were having a casual conversation on-line when the idea of grabbing a meal together came up. When she suggested Dontino's Fine Italian Cuisine, I was definitely intrigued by the notion. Having driven by the restaurant hundreds of times, nothing had ever prompted me to consider actually stopping in for a meal. Until today. Seeing as we were both slammed for the holidays, we agreed to wait until the new year to check out this long-time Akron staple.

Having been around for eighty-one years, the restaurant itself was fairly simple to find. Located at the corner of East Cuyahoga Falls and Linden Avenues, there was ample parking behind the restaurant. Technically the restaurant was located at 555 East Cuyahoga Falls Avenue, Akron, OH 44310 and can be reached at 330-928-9530. Interestingly, there were two entrances to Dontino's. The first was the door at the front of the restaurant on the corner. The second was towards the rear of the restaurant on Linden Avenue. Either led you into the restaurant.

Here was a shot of the front of the restaurant:


Tonight Kathy and I decided to enter the rear entrance (since we had parked in the lot behind the restaurant and this was the closer of the two entrances) and once inside, we were greeted with tonight's specials board:


I'm not quite sure what "Guinness" was doing underneath the dessert selection for the day, but I've often considered Guinness to be substantial enough for a meal, so I didn't really give it a second thought. We indicated two for dinner and our hostess led us to an incredibly dimly lit table just off the lobby.

She left us with the menu to peruse:





[Ed. Note: For the camera geeks out there, in order to get a non-blurry handheld shot of the menu panels, I had to jack my camera up to an ISO of 3200 and the exposures still took nearly 1/2 a second. Thank goodness for image stabilization and some serious post-processing work in the GIMP. Fortunately, I was able to return to a more sane ISO of 200 for the food pictures since I had my tripod.]

After placing our food order, the server was quick to return with a basket of sliced seedless Italian bread:


When the bread first came out, it was reasonably fresh, but it quickly staled and by the end of the meal, would've made a good candidate for croutons or French toast. The bread was served room temperature and while useful for sopping up red sauce off my dinner plate, was entirely unremarkable on its own.

As Kathy and I had both ordered an entree for our dinners, each came with a side salad with choice of dressing:


Among the myriad of salad dressings our server named, only the house Italian was homemade. Both Kathy and I decided to go in that direction. The salad was about as tasty as it looked. The tomato was mealy and hard (it was a January tomato after all), the salad was completely unseasoned, and the dressing had split into oil and vinegar components. Hoping that the seasoning would be in the dressing, I liberally applied it to the greens. While there was definitely a lovely garlic flavor in the dressing, it lacked the kind of seasoning needed to punch up the flavors. Fortunately, a glass jar of grated Parmesan cheese (from the "green" can, I would assume) sat at the edge of our table. I generously dusted the top of my salad with the cheese, "tossed" my salad slightly, and took another bite. Eureka! Kathy repeated the experiment to her salad and came to a similar conclusion.

Tonight I decided to go with the Thursday evening special for my entree, Sausage and Peppers:


At the time I ordered this dish, I hadn't realized that it came with a side of pasta. For an additional $0.75, you can upgrade any of the pastas to homemade pasta. So, unfortunately, it was dried pasta for me. As I lifted the spoon from beneath my pasta, I noticed one of my pet peeves: a pool of water under the pasta. While one can argue whether plain noodles should be topped with sauce or whether the almost-cooked pasta should be finished by tossing it thoroughly in the sauce, one thing that should never be present is a puddle of water under the pasta. Fortunately, the water was fairly minimal and the red sauce thick enough that when I got around to eating it, the two integrated into a decent consistency.

As for the flavor, the spaghetti and red sauce were good, consistent with most mom and pop Italian restaurants. The pasta hadn't been cooked to death and once I topped the pasta with a bit of hot pepper flakes, it was spiced to my personal preference. The sausages were a little on the dry side, but definitely not so dry that it crumbled. While there was seasoning in the sausage, I missed the anise flavor that fennel seeds would have brought to the party (a traditional flavor found in most Italian sausage). There was also an absence of any chile heat that red pepper flakes usually provide. I didn't find the flavor objectionable, per se, but more uninteresting.

Kathy, knowing that her entree came with a side of pasta, opted to upgrade to the homemade spaghetti topped with the same red sauce that I had:


Kathy ordered the Chicken Parmesan and she let me try a bit of her chicken (I had let her try some of the sausage from my dish). It certainly wasn't the best Chicken Parmesan I've ever had (that honor goes to Monte Carlo Italian Kitchen), but it wasn't bad either. It was clear the breading had herbs in it as not only could I taste them, but I could also see them.

When the subject of dessert came up, our server rattled off a list of several usual suspects (tiramisu and spimoni) as well as one that had been highlighted on the specials board at the front of the restaurant, Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie:


Not surprisingly, Dontino's didn't make any of their desserts and this was more than likely standard food service fare that you could get at any of the national chain restaurants. But, since Kathy and I wanted to end our meal on a sweet note, we each donned a fork and split the wedge of pie within just a couple of bites. It tasted good, but as I suspected, it wasn't exceptional or even really that unique.

Our meal complete, the server brought our check. Since Kathy and I had ordered virtually identically priced meals and split the dessert, she agreed when I suggested we divide it right down the middle. With tip and tax, each of us shelled out $18 for our meal tonight at Dontino's. While this certainly didn't break the bank for either of us, it wasn't exactly inexpensive either. Neither of us left physically hungry, but I can't help but think that tonight's visit didn't really quench my craving for really GOOD Italian food. I'm certain that being around for eighty-plus years has made for some arduous fans of Dontino's food. Based on the food from this first visit, I remain unconvinced.

Kicking Off Linuxfest With Monte Carlo Italian Kitchen

The time has come for another round of restaurants reviews during my weekend spent in Columbus, Ohio for the 2010 Ohio Linuxfest. While this year I decided to rent a hotel room after snagging a killer deal on Priceline for the Ramada in Westerville, I did meet up with my aunt and cousin for dinner on Saturday night at a local Thai restaurant. But more about that in a future entry.

After getting off of work on Friday night, I managed to hop in my car around 5:45 PM and with relatively little problem, arrived in Columbus at the I-71 and I-270 interchange by Polaris right around 8:00 PM. Not knowing exactly when I would be arriving tonight, I hadn't made any firm dinner plans and when I realized that I would be getting to my destination early enough in the evening, I thought I would check out an old favorite of mine that ironically was less than half a mile from my hotel.

I pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall complex on the north side of Shrock Road, just east of the intersection of Cleveland Avenue and Shrock Road, to find that Monte Carlo Italian Kitchen was still open for business. At least until 9 PM. Located at 610 West Shrock Road, Westerville, OH 43081, they can also be reached at 614-890-2061. Parking was available in the general strip mall parking lot in front of all the stores.

Here was a shot of the storefront's exterior:


What I didn't expect as I walked through the front door was that the place would be packed, every single seat at every single table filled, a mere fifty minutes before they were scheduled to close for the evening. Fortunately, there was a small two-top in the corner by the emergency exit door that I was all too happy to take. Clearly most of these tables were finishing up their meals as within roughly fifteen minutes, the place went from being mobbed to eerily quiet and empty.

After seating me, my server left me to ponder the menu:





The reason I hadn't returned to Monte Carlo during prior Linuxfest weekends was that when I lived in Columbus six years ago, the restaurant wasn't open for dinner on Saturday night. If I didn't make it down on Friday night in time for dinner (which was pretty much every year), I was out of luck. Fortunately, I was happy to see that they now have Saturday evening hours for diners who can't make it on Friday night.

From what I remember of my dinners at Monte Carlo, I recall them having several seriously good dishes on the menu; however, beyond those, the food wasn't all that particularly memorable. Unfortunately, given that I was only going to have enough time to visit Monte Carlo once during my weekend in Columbus, I knew that I wouldn't be able to give the menu the thorough vetting I felt it required. This realization led me to focus on deciding which of the two standout dishes from my past to order tonight: chicken Parmesan with gnocchi and red sauce or the lasagna.

While I was deciding what to have, my server brought out dinner rolls:


While these weren't anything particularly special, they were fresh enough and strangely, after chewing them for a minute or so, I was surprised to experience a sudden sweetness that had been missing when I took my first bite. I repeated the experiment several times and was rewarded with the same results at the conclusion of each trial. Interesting.

After deciding on my entrée, I also went ahead and added a garden salad to my order:


Already, memories from past meals were beginning to re-emerge from the depths of my brain. It seemed that the rather basic, tasteless iceberg lettuce salad that had been served six years ago was still on the menu. Different, however, was the house dressing:


Salads used to come with dressing in prepackaged foil-enclosed containers ... Marzetti, if I remembered correctly. Tonight's dressing had clearly been made in house and while fairly mild in terms of acidity and spices, a generous application at least added some desperately needed flavor to the salad greens.

For my dinner, it hadn't taken much effort on my part to decide what made Monte Carlo memorable in my mind, and I easily chose the chicken Parmesan with gnocchi and red sauce:


While the menu had been amended to offer both shrimp and cod Parmesan (which I thought sounded awfully odd considering that Italians don't pair seafood and cheese together), I stuck with what I knew and was quite pleased to see what the kitchen had prepared for me tonight. What always fascinated me about the chicken Parmesan was how fresh it tasted. Because it was a nice thick piece of chicken, it always stayed moist. The coating was flavorful, the breast was fried with an expert hand, and it was never greasy. The red sauce was thick and rich and always well-balanced.

As I took a closer shot of my chicken Parmesan tonight, my mouth began to water:


Upon cutting into the chicken breast with knife and fork, I was rewarded with EXACTLY the same culinary experience I had last witnessed six years ago:


This was chicken Parmesan par excellence! Everything I had hoped would be present was still there. From first bite to last, I relished every single mouthful. Between the chicken and the gnocchi, there was enough food for dinner tonight AND leftovers tomorrow, but since I had yet to check into my hotel and didn't know if I had a refrigerator in my room, I decided to greedily finish the entire portion.

Served up next to the chicken was the side of gnocchi with more of the red sauce:


The gnocchi were soft and pillowy, but not light and ethereal like the type that I prefer. I managed to isolate a single piece of pasta sans sauce and tasted it. Having had GREAT gnocchi in the past, these fell into the good, but not great, category. I could barely taste any potato flavor in the pasta, a hallmark of freshly made gnocchi. That being said, the gnocchi were also exactly as I remember them. I think the difference between then and now is that I've learned what really great gnocchi are supposed to taste like.

When my server returned to drop off my change after paying the check, I spoke with her for a few minutes about the food. It seemed that while the veal and chicken were individually pounded and breaded from fresh cuts of meat at the restaurant, both the shrimp and cod Parmesan were prepared from frozen products that were simply fried a la minute. I was also sad to hear, but not surprised to learn, that the gnocchi were not a homemade product. Which was a shame since the gnocchi were listed on their menu as a "signature" pasta and as such, commanded a premium price.

Regardless, I highly enjoyed my meal tonight and would return with very little apprehension for the chicken Parmesan again and again if I still lived in Columbus. Even with the food service rolls, tasteless iceberg lettuce salad and questionable provenance of the gnocchi, the chicken Parmesan and their red sauce was enough to trump all the other less-than-stellar components of my meal tonight. While I didn't have a chance to try the lasagna tonight, if it has remained consistent over all these years, you might just want to give that a chance, too.

A Trip To This Galaxy Will Cost You

My grandfather was very loyal to certain restaurants. He knew the owner, the menu, and most importantly, the wait staff. A meal for him was much more than showing up, having a cocktail, eating food, and paying the check. For him it was equally about connecting with other people and learning a little bit (or a lot) of their life's story. For a number of years, he called Li'l Joe's Pub in Bath, Ohio, his home away from home. This was where he would go to unwind, have a Manhattan (or two) and order one of his favorites from the menu, like the linguine with white clam sauce. Sadly, Li'l Joe's closed down a number of years ago (although Papa Joe's is still going strong) and in its place today are the Ken Stewart power duo of Tre Belle and The Lodge.

Without a place to go on a regular basis, my grandfather sought the comforts of an eatery much closer to where he lived in Wadsworth, the Galaxy Restaurant. At the time it was just a restaurant and banquet facility, but over the years a pub, wine room, and small market have been added. While I have eaten on and off at this restaurant for over a dozen years since it originally opened, it wasn't until I saw fellow food blogger CJ's review on CJ's Real Deals on Meals that I realized that with all of the Wadsworth restaurants I HAD reviewed, for some reason I missed this one.

I decided to stop out today for a late lunch and do a formal review of them. The facility was located right off of I-76 and Rt. 94. The address was 201 Park Center Drive, Wadsworth, OH 44281 and they can be reached at 330-334-3663. Parking was available in a lot that surrounds the entire building. Here was the sign that delineated where the property began:


Once I had parked, I walked up to the entrance (there were several) that was most closely connected with the dining room:


Fortunately, once you are inside, there is a connecting hallway that runs the length of the building from the banquet facilities to the pub. The dining room seemed particularly empty and when the woman manning the hostess booth returned to her station, she said that I could eat in the dining room if I wanted to or I could enjoy myself (and the same lunch menu) over in the pub. Figuring that there would at least be a television or two to entertain me while I ate, I chose to walk past the small market to the pub entrance.

After being seated, I was handed the menu:





While the menu has evolved and adapted over the years, there were still some old stalwarts in existence on the menu today: The chicken salad has been a long-time favorite of my grandmother's. When I saw that they were offering hand breaded onion rings, I decided to pair them with one of the sandwiches. But first, I was in the mood for either a cup of soup or a small salad. Interestingly, some of the salads offered were plated in either half or full portions. When I saw the spinach salad with bacon and hard boiled egg AND that it was available in a half size, I was hooked.

Here was my spinach salad:


This was a HALF portion! It was huge. I can only imagine how large the full portion would be. The salad came pre-dressed with a red wine vinaigrette and while I was initially worried that it would come swimming in dressing, I was pleasantly surprised that it was dressed perfectly. Besides the spinach leaves, the salad had cooked and chopped bacon, egg, mushrooms, red onion slivers, shredded carrots, and in an unusual twist, fresh bean sprouts.

First, the good. The dressing had a nice balance to it between the sweet and the sour. The spinach was very fresh and crunchy. The bacon added nice bursts of saltiness to the dish. The bean sprouts, even with all of the other flavors going on, easily sang through the other flavors, but didn't overpower the symphony of flavors. Second, the not-so-good. The mushrooms were slimy. There was barely any egg in the salad. The dressing needed more salt. Nevertheless, I finished my portion.

While I already knew I would be upgrading my order today to take advantage of the onion rings, I wasn't quite sure with which sandwich I would pair it. I let my gaze fall across the "Sandwiches" section of the menu until it eventually gravitated to the Chicken Parmesan sandwich served on a toasted hoagie roll. This was what I would order today.

Here was a shot of my lunch as it arrived from the kitchen:


First, let's talk about the Chicken Parmesan sandwich:


The bun was fresh and nicely toasted, with the exception of the spine, where sauce had compromised the integrity of the bun and turned it into a marinara mush. The rather large and awkward piece of fried-from-frozen chicken didn't sit very well on the hoagie bun and I had to use my knife to more or less cut it into multiple pieces and wedge it between the two halves. The marinara looked a little bit scant in terms of portion size, but when I finally bit into the sandwich, it turned out to be an adequate amount of sauce. Picking up my newly adjusted sandwich, I took a bite and was rewarded with hot, but completely dry chicken meat. It wasn't dessicated, but neither was it juicy. The sandwich was ... eh, okay.

I next turned my attention to the onion rings:


First, the good. The breading was tasty and not greasy. Clearly these had been hand breaded just before frying. On onion rings that had some thickness to them, the sweet flavor from the onion was a nice balance to the saltiness of the coating. Overall, these were decent rings. Second, the bad. Not very many of the rings were thick enough to provide the proper sweet contrast to the savory outside coating. Many of the rings were so thin before frying that they became like onion jerky. Finally, clearly these had been hand breaded just before frying. Yes, yes, gentle reader, I know I listed that in the positives column. Let me explain. Because they hadn't had time to sit with the coating on them before frying, as you touched each ring, heck, if you breathed in the wrong direction, the coating on the rings would shatter and fall off. It became almost an exercise in futility to try and get a ring with coating into your mouth.

Accompanying the onion rings today was a side of Bistro Sauce. While it looked like Thousand Island dressing, when I tasted it, the additional flavors of sweet pickle relish and a spiciness of some type, perhaps cayenne, also came into play. The sauce actually went well with the onion rings, but because the rings were so nicely seasoned, I didn't use very much of the sauce. My server, distressed that I hadn't like the sauce because I had placed it on the table instead of on my plate, asked me if I didn't like it. I assured him that everything was fine and I had only placed it on the table to give me more room on the plate.

With tax and suitable tip, my lunch today (I had a glass of water) came to $19. Now, $19 isn't exactly cheap for lunch, and given the quality of the lunch I did have, I'd say the value today was a bit in question. While the Galaxy (and especially the pub) have served as a popular meeting spot for out-of-town friends who need a spot for a pint of their favorite frosty beverage and a bite to eat, for this kind of money, the food really ought to be stellar. I do intend to return to review the dinner menu in the dining room. Since lunch is the same no matter where you sit, I hope that this review gave you a good idea of what to expect should you decide to go for yourself.

Another Visit To Lindsay's Amber Restaurant

I was in the mood for something inexpensive. I was in the mood for something local. I was in the mood for something quick, but definitely not interested in fast food. Having had a rather successful meal at the most unlikely of places, Lindsay's Amber Restaurant, I decided that the planets had aligned sufficiently and I set my sights on returning to this odd duck of a restaurant. The first time I had gone, I had ordered their fried chicken and Jo Jo's and been quite surprised at how well executed both were. I had been back one time previous to tonight and while the burger I ordered was decent, it wasn't nearly as good as the chicken had been.

I arrived at around 7:30 PM to find that as in previous visits, the restaurant was mostly empty. I heard one of the waitresses talking to a customer at another table and telling him that while it was slow now, it had been busy earlier. I'm not sure what exactly "busy" constitutes at Lindsay's because there was enough seating for about one hundred people when full.

Picking up the menu tonight, I let my eyes wander from section to section to see if anything jumped out at me. Knowing that the fried chicken was cooked to order and could take a while, I decided to try something else instead. When my gaze fell onto the pasta section, I saw that my only two choices were spaghetti and meatballs and chicken Parmesan. Somehow my brain made the connection between the previously-eaten fried chicken and the chicken Parmesan and I managed to convince myself that if the one had been good, then logically it follows that the other must be as well, right? They are both chicken after all.

With my pasta dish, I was allowed the choice of one side. I decided to go with the garden salad:


This was pretty much your standard Iceberg lettuce salad with shredded carrots, sliced cucumbers, red cabbage, boxed croûtons and French dressing on the side. There was nothing fancy about the salad, but the greens were nice and crisp and the croûtons added a needed saltiness to each bite.

Having finished my salad, my entrée arrived at the table:


As soon as I saw the two whitish squares of cheese on my plate, I began to worry. As it turned out, my suspicions were confirmed when I tried to prepare a forkful for eating. The cheese was not only Mozzarella, but it was the incredibly stringy variety. This made it incredibly difficult to eat a forkful of chicken or pasta without also dragging up half a slice of cheese at a time. Plus, cheese on the chicken is the norm for this dish; but cheese on the pasta, too? If such a thing were possible, this was simply too much cheese.

Here was a shot of the pasta portion of the dish:


Sadly, this pasta was overcooked. Not to the point where it turned to mush, but it lacked the nice chewy texture that pasta cooked properly should have. Along with being overcooked, the pasta had also not been drained properly as it was sitting in a puddle of water. Sadly, this is a common problem and while Lindsay's doesn't bill itself as an Italian restaurant, if a dish is being offered on the menu, it should be prepared a little more carefully.

Here was a side shot of my chicken breast:


Here you can see two important things. First, the chicken had a nice thickness to it and it wasn't dried out. Second, the orange puddle underneath the chicken breast was the plethora of water in which the entire entrée was sitting. I tried the meat sauce by itself and found it to be a bit on the acidic side and strongly seasoned, but still palatable. While the chicken was juicy, it was clear to me that this chicken had been heavily brined. The chicken meat had a strong metallic flavor which I found rather off-putting. While the top parts of the chicken had a nice coating on them, sadly the coating on the side in contact with the pooled water had more or less dissolved from the bottom of the breast.

With my pasta dish, I received a side of garlic bread:


The garlic bread did have some of the toasted bread flavor to it, but in the end, I found the garlic bread suffered the same fate that the chicken breast did, a strange metallic taste. I didn't detect the presence of any actual garlic, so I'm assuming the flavor came from either garlic powder or garlic salt. I ended up only eating one of the two pieces and by that point needed to finish the remainder of my water to loosen the grip of those salty and metallic flavors from my palate.

I realize that my expectations are high for a dish that many restaurants, Italian or not, have on their menu. However, having eaten their very tasty and moist fried chicken, the bar had been set fairly high. What I experienced today was food that caused my palate to fatigue so quickly because of strong and unbalanced flavors. The overcooked pasta was a technical error that could've been prevented and the puddle of water that my food sat in was simply due to carelessness after reheating the pasta.

I'm not going to cross Lindsay's Amber Restaurant off my list quite yet. Their fried chicken remains a signature dish and a highlight of my three experiences there. Based on my dinner tonight, however, I'd probably recommend you stay away from the chicken Parmesan; there are much better dishes on the menu.

On The Fence At Carlo's Trattoria

Clearly I underestimated the situation when I decided to take the advice of an old college fraternity brother and check out the restaurant at Hartville Kitchens. He had made the recommendation to try out the restaurant and stated how popular it was. However, I had made the silly decision to show up at 6 PM on a Friday night. Seriously bad move. The parking lot didn't look all that full, but as I approached the front of the building, I saw the one thing that I dread the most when going out to eat: A long line. Now, I don't have a problem with waiting fifteen or twenty minutes to get seated at a table in a restaurant at which I particularly want to dine. However, there appeared to be as many people waiting in line outside the hostess' station as there were sitting inside the restaurant actually eating. Giving the queue a quick once over, I don't feel too generous in saying that there were at least two hundred people standing in line waiting to get in.

While clearly people that dedicated to standing in that long of a line indicated that the food was promising, I had no desire to stand there for an hour or more just waiting to get a taste of it. At the same time, I also had no desire to drive aimlessly around Hartville, looking for an alternative. It was at that moment I remembered I had recently installed the GoodDining application on my G1 smartphone. I activated the program, waited for my GPS position to be acquired and started looking around the map for an alternative. Sadly, it was mostly fast food joints, which I wasn't in the mood for either. However, one of the restaurants that was listed nearby was a place called Carlo's Trattoria. Figuring that Italian might just hit the spot tonight, I decided to make my way over to the restaurant.

Carlo's Trattoria was located at 733 West Maple Street, Hartville, OH 44632 and can be reached at 330-877-4300. While there was information on the Internet about Carlo's, there was no website that I could identify as their own. From the street, Carlo's looks like a tiny building. Although there was parking available in front of the restaurant, it was already filled to the brim. Fortunately, there was additional parking in the rear of the restaurant.

I parked, grabbed my cellphone and approached the rear entrance to the restaurant:


Once inside, I marveled at how much larger the restaurant appears on the inside than on the outside. Clearly the whole Dr. - Who - Tardus - multi - dimensional - expansiveness was in full effect at this quaint little trattoria. There were multiple seating areas and chairs available up at the counter area. While I normally would've tried to find a small table for two, nothing except larger tables for six or eight people were available. Knowing full well that I would feel uncomfortable sitting at tables that large on a Friday night, I opted to sit at the counter. While I've never found that counter seats are very comfortable, they certainly give me an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the service staff and the kitchen.

Here was a shot of the front of the menu:


Oddly enough, the lighting at the counter was somewhat muted. I've tried to make an effort to take photographs of menus for restaurants with no website so that you, gentle reader, can have a really good idea of the kind of food to expect should you decide to visit for yourself. Unfortunately, both inside pages of the menu had a dark green background. With the poor lighting and the even poorer color choice for the background, I can tell you right now that those pictures would've been illegible. That being said, I will say that the menu isn't overly complicated and contains common Italian dining choices: soups, salads, appetizers, hot subs, cold subs, pizzas, house specialties, and pastas. Prices seemed reasonable and the pastas ranged from $9 to $13.

One of the first things I noticed on the menu was that gnocchi was offered on the pasta menu. When my server came over to take my order, I asked him about the origins of the gnocchi. Our conversation went something like this:

"Is the gnocchi homemade?"
Smirking oddly, my server answered after a dramatic pause, "Yes."
"Um, okay, that didn't sound too convincing. Do I need to ask additional questions?"
"Well, the gnocchi is cooked here in the kitchen where we then serve it to you."

I smiled trying the lighten the mood. "Well, I would hope that it was cooked in your kitchen, regardless of where it was made."

Realizing that he was going to have to either fully embrace the lie or tell the truth, he finally admitted, "We have been told to tell customers that the gnocchi is homemade, but it really is made elsewhere."

Regardless of whether the gnocchi is homemade or not, I have to commend this young man for telling the truth. It also gives me pause about an establishment that would ask its employees to lie to customers when asked a very specific question. Perhaps the gnocchi is fabulous, whether it is made in house or not. I would think that a better tactic would be to have the servers push how good it tastes and de-emphasize (but not lie about) the lineage of the pasta in question. As it turns out, I would find several other unpleasant aspects about my visit tonight.

The other entree I had been contemplating was the chicken parmesan. With my mind made up concerning the gnocchi question, I decided to go ahead and order the chicken parmesan with the extra upgrade of the soup or salad. I opted to go with a garden salad with French dressing on the side:


The salad was fairly basic and consisted of the usual suspects with the addition of banana pepper rings. The salt, spice, and acidity that the banana peppers added to the overall flavor of the salad was actually very nice. I definitely think this was the right choice over the soup. As I sat there munching away at my salad, I started to observe the chaos that was the server station right in front of me. Reminiscent of a scene out of the movie Waiting..., the server station was a hub of activity during my entire visit. One of the activities performed at the station was the preparation of salads. That by itself was not very interesting.

What WAS interesting, however, was that salads more involved than simply a tongful of salad greens and a small plastic cup of dressing were being prepared there. One of the salads on the menu, an antipasto salad, had rolled-up cigars of ham as part of the presentation. To prepare this salad, one of the servers actually used ungloved hands to remove several slices of deli ham from a package, cut the slices in half with a knife and then rolled them up individually into cigars.

The problem I had with what I saw wasn't that the hands were gloved or ungloved. Personally, if sanitation is kept as priority number one, then the use of a glove can be superfluous. However, in this particular case, the same server who was preparing the salad was also one who had been running food and busing tables just moments earlier. Even with the most diligent of hand washers, this was not a good thing to see.

The other issue I noticed while eating my salad was an incident where a side towel fell onto the floor. Instead of throwing the dirty towel into a used bin to be rewashed, it was simply picked up off the floor and used to wipe down several sauce squirt bottles that were used at the sub/pizza making station. With the amount of traffic in the server station and it being a hectic time during service, the floor was more than likely teeming with lots of less-than-desirable critters. I'm just happy that I didn't order the antipasto salad or anything from the sub/pizza station. Then again, if they are this sloppy in full view of the restaurant, what was the kitchen (which isn't in plain view) like?

Along with my salad, my server brought me an order of Carlo's garlic bread:


Oddly enough, in comparison to many of the garlic breads out there, this one actually had garlic on it! It wasn't quite as forceful in flavor as other versions I've tried, but the nice balance between the garlic and the herbs was refreshing. In a nod to my garlic bread and French dressing addiction I alluded to in an earlier post about Parasson's, I tried this combination at Carlo's; good, but not quite the same.

Only moments after I finished my salad, my entree arrived:


At $13.24, this entree was the most expensive pasta/protein combo on the menu. However, the portion was immense. The chicken breast was at least one inch thick in spots and covered the entire oval platter. I'm not sure where Carlo was getting his chicken breasts, but those must be some really large birds. The coating was nicely fried and not greasy. The first couple of pieces from the end were a tad dry, but once I got further into the interior of the breast, the moistness really began showing through. The seasoning was spot on. At first I thought the cheese was plain old mozzarella, but upon tasting it and re-reading the menu, I realized it was actually a young shredded parmesan instead.

Accompanying my chicken parmesan was a side of spaghetti and marinara sauce (I could've chosen rigotoni in its place had I desired). Here was a close-up shot of the side of spaghetti:


The sauce had a nice simple tomato flavor, but didn't have any real depth or character. It wasn't bad, per se, it just didn't have a lot of personality to it. The pasta, sadly, was overcooked and served in a puddle of water. I surmised that the kitchen was most likely in the middle of being slammed, being that it was a Friday night, but honestly, I would've gladly waited an extra thirty seconds for the pasta to be drained properly before being tossed onto this platter and topped with sauce.

When my plate finally looked like this,


I realized that my stomach was quite full and asked for a container to bring home the remainder. What I ended up leaving with was still more than a pound of food. Based on what I was served and what I was seeing others being served, I quickly realized that you won't go away from Carlo's hungry. I paid my check, tipped my server extra generously for telling me the truth about the gnocchi and headed back out to my car to return home.

I have mixed feelings about Carlo's Trattoria. It offers your basic hearty pasta and red sauce kind of Italian food that most Americans think of as "Italian" food. In this sense it achieves a modicum amount of success in my mind. That being said, with the food sanitation issues I witnessed tonight and the information that my server finally confessed to me about the gnocchi, unless you are a persistent questioner like I am, you might find yourself purposely misinformed about their menu because of what the higher-ups have told the servers to say. That bothers me quite a lot.

This is one of those rare situations where I am neither going to recommend nor not recommend that you check out a restaurant. Based on the facts (and photographs) I've laid out in this review, I think that every reader must make up his or her own mind. Is this good basic Italian food? Yes. Is it unique or memorable? Not particularly. Are you willing to risk experiencing some of the sanitation issues I observed tonight? Well ... that answer is up to you.