I’m a big fan of M&P type restaurants. Lucky for me, living in Dallas, there seems to be an endless supply.
I’ll go to Asian, Mexican, American, Black (sorry, I’m not sure of the correct term to use here) and anything else that sounds new and interesting.
Italian tho’, this is the only type restaurant I can honestly say I’ve never had a bad experience. (Why?) Sure, some are better than others but none of them were bad* and all of them were better than The Olive Garden.
It makes me wonder if italian food is the easiest food to cook on the planet or what?
Yeah, one in Wisconsin. My sister’s then-fiance said it was the best he’d ever had when he took us there. My husband swore that his pasta had been fried at some point in the process, and I’ve pretty much repressed the memory of what I had.
We had one near us that just went out of business after 60-70 years. I felt bad for the employees, but my husband said “good riddance.” When we had been there, the pasta was poorly drained so it was sitting in a puddle of water. We ordered different types of pasta, and his was homemade and mine was out of a box. No indication on the menu of the difference.
We ordered soft drinks, and the waitress asked if we wanted refills. Around here, refills are free, so when we got the bill we were surprised to see that she’d charged for them. When we asked, she said that drinks came from the bar and the bar tab was separate, so there was a charge for each drink. She never told us that.
Sure. We’ve got a small mom&pop italian place by us. Homemade sauce and all of that. It’s okay but not as good as Olive Garden. We just go there because it’s half the price of OG.
I think people have a bias in favor of mom&pop places. I find each one to either stand or fall on it’s own. I favor plenty of local pizza places over the pizzahut/papajohns variety but that’s not to say I have had a nasty local made pizza that I would trade in a minute for Pizzahut crap.
There was even a small mom&pop BBQ joint that opened that I thought would be preferable to the big chain Famous Daves. It was terrible fatty meat chopped up and I never went back.
There are plenty of bad Italian Ma and Pa places. Like George’s (Brocton, MA). Many years ago, we were told that George’s was fantastic-so we went one night. I figure the place would be OK-lots of locals ate there, and it was a typical post WWII italian place (checked tableclothes, old wireback chairs). The food was awful (they used american cheese on the veal parmigiano, and the spaghetti was limp. Being generous, we paid and left…I figured even a good place has bad nights. About 15 years later, I was looking for a place to take my daughter-GEORGE’s! Yep, same lousy food!
The incredible thing-lots of my Italian-American friends love the place!
There’s one north of Chicago in Evanston (Dave’s Italian Kitchen) that many seem to love, but I found poor in quality. Overcooked pasta in cloying sauces and just a very general 1950’s Americanized Italian food thing going on.
Better to try the far superior Va Pensiero a few blocks away.
Ja, there’s a couple in Mpls, too. One’s located near an Olive Garden, and I’d take the OG over this one any day. It’s just…bland, I guess. Blander than OG. It seems very midwestern there; I don’t think they use any spices at all. Their marinara isn’t any better than jarred, the pasta’s overcooked…it’s OK, but not even close to good.
Another place downtown used to be rather celebrated, but I found the experience awful. My alfredo was simply a white sauce, as in cream and flour. This was just plain bad.
Does a pizza shop count as a M&P Italian restaurant? If so, the answer is an emphatic hell yeah.
When I was in high school, there was a place (west of Rochester NY) called, I think, O Solo Mio. I never ate there but friends assured me that it was some of the most vile food in the world. ANd the owner was apparently a real prick. Average length of employment there was about three days.
Las Cruces, New Mexico. Several Italian restaurants in town, and not a single one of them can match up to the quality of a mediocre strip plaza mom-and-pop in a city with a large Italian population. Olive Garden is a an order of magnitude better than the best Italian restaurant in Cruces. Even Fazolis is better than the best Italian restaurant in Cruces. Cruces has the best Mexican food in the country, but the worst Italian by far.
Many small midwestern towns: the local mom-and-pop Italian restaurant is usually a vinyl checkered tablecloth-kind of place that serves mainly pizza. The pizza will be adequate, and anything else is pretty bad. The biggest problems: watery, bland sauce, poorly drained pasta, and items that are either undercooked, overcooked or unevenly cooked.
Rust belt cities with large Italian populations: yes, I’ve found bad Italian food there, too. Locals seem to believe that because it’s the gritty rust belt, and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an Italian-American, the Italian food must be good; it’s an “authentic” environment, after all. Nope. My last place of residence was in a suburb of Cleveland with a good-sized Italian population, and the mom-and-pop Italian restaurant about a half mile away was only mediocre. An indicator: despite a large population with last names that end in vowels, the times I’ve visited that restaurant the majority of customers were speaking Russian.
If a waitress specifically asked me if I wanted a refill (as opposed to me asking her for one) and then charged me for it without telling me it would be an additional cost, the $$$ I was charged for the refill would come out of her tip…
I am always a generous tipper ( I know I know, we do NOT need to go into another tipping epic) but on principal, I will not reward that kind of bullshit.
One in St. Louis, I’d heard it was good, but I forget the name.
The food was bland, aside from that way too much salt flavor restauarants use when they don’t actually know how to season food. Olive Garden would’ve been better.
Not sure if this qualifies as “mom and pop”, but it certainly was a hole in the wall that billed itself as Italian. It was on the road between Denver and Estes Park, just as you got into the mountains - looking at the map it may have been Lyons. Anyway, the italian sausage sandwich was only slightly better than I would have expected from fast food (bland, mostly,) but the kicker was what they gave all of us as a side dish. Doritos. In a bag!
Oh, we told her we didn’t expect to pay for refills we hadn’t been told there were a charge for. We didn’t get all bitchy about it, but we were firm. She removed the extra charge, and if she had to pay the tab out of her pocket, that was very unfortunate, but it could have been avoided if she had simply said, “Refills are not free here, but do you want another glass?” Everyone here knows that the expectation is for free refills. We left a tip that was on the small side of average, and never went back again (see comment about pasta sitting in puddle of water).