The Unvegan

With a night of partying in Santa Monica looming and a dire need of dinner, we turned to a place on Santa Monica’s Main Street called World Cafe. I really didn’t know what to expect from the place except that I had a feeling it would involve food from around the world. When we took our seats and then took a gander into the menu, it became apparent that World Cafe was not at all a cafe of the world.

I had expected to see food from all over the world, like Sri Lankan curry, Icelandic swan, The Falklands penguin and Uzbekistani rock. Instead, I found myself gazing into menu full of Italian food. Okay, I guess there were a few random appetizers. Real worldly. This obviously wasn’t the place to get any new and exciting food, but at least I would make the best of it.

Within the exotic pizza menu, I found a pie fit for an unvegan. It was called the Chicken Pesto pizza and was so unvegan that it didn’t use tomato sauce. Instead, it used pesto, topped with mozzarella, goat cheese, toasted pine nuts and, of course, the chicken. At 16 bucks, I thought it might be a bit pricey, but when it came out, it happened to be about the size of medium pizza, which made me feel better.

I took off a slice and got down to the eating. What I found was actually a pretty good pizza. The dough was nice and thin, but got a bit flimsy/soggy in the middle of the pie. The goat cheese had been tossed on kind of half-assedly, to the point where a piece or two didn’t even have goat cheese. This was sad, because that cheese was awesome. I didn’t need the pizza to be smothered with it, because that would have ruined the allure, but a little more even distribution would have been nice. As for the rest, the chicken was sliced into thin strips and tasted pretty good, with the mozzarella and pesto were just what I would expect: good, but nothing amazing.

The pizza actually turned out to taste better than I expected. I was also happy about the quantity, even though I still scarfed down the entire thing. The goat cheese was a great touch, if not executed perfectly. I guess my opinion of the restaurant is somewhat tainted because of the name (just rename the place Cafe Italy and then call me), but if you can overlook the misnomer, you might find yourself with some pretty good Italian food.