‘Pasta’
Yes, you read that right: A First Time for Olive Garden. Somehow this Italian chain restaurant, which finds itself in every big or small city in the country, has evaded me for my whole life. But on Friday that all changed. I found myself at Olive Garden for the first time and I was eager to find out what all the fuss was about. It all started with bread sticks.
On our way out of town via the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, we were in need of a convenient place for a bite to eat. Across the street from the airport, we found the Daily Grill, an mid-level restaurant chain for American food that can found throughout California and a little beyond. As we needed to catch a flight, there was little time to dilly dally and I quickly scanned the menu and found their Penne Pasta with Chicken.
A long long time ago, the girlfriend and I went on a binge of buying up restaurant gift certificates. They would have specials like $20 for $10 and other such things that seemed like no-brainers. Fast forward to six months later and loads of these gift certificates are sitting around collecting dust. We could take it no more and decided to use one at a restaurant called Food Fair by Diego. It is in the strange area that is sort of West Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Melrose or something like that, so even though the name sounded like it would be a pretentious joint (how many typical restaurants put the chef’s name in the restaurant name, it actually turned out to be in a one of those corner strips and was kind of a hole in the wall.
For a quick lunch idea to please a few people, the girlfriend and I decided to pick up food from Corner Bakery. Although the place is pretty well-known for its sandwiches, I was in no mood for such food. Instead, I found that they had a little selection of pasta dishes that looked like a good lunch to me. Of these, the Pesto Cavatappi looked best to me.
With a name like Al Gelato, you kind of expect to be walking into a gelato shop. This is not the case with Al Gelato in Beverly Hills. Sure, the place has gelato, but it is also a full-on Italian restaurant. Aside from realizing that it wasn’t just a gelato place, I also found that Al Gelato didn’t carry a lot of the pretension that Italian restaurants seem to have. There was no mood lighting, no fancy table cloths and no people with strange accents that weren’t quite Italian. Despite this, I found that the prices still fell into what you would expect in Beverly Hills, with very little under 10 bucks and pasta prices jumping up to 15 if you wanted any meat.
To grab some dinner, and take advantage of one of our seemingly endless restaurant gift cards, the girlfriend and I headed to Maggiano’s Little Italy next to The Grove. When we arrived, there was a pretty long line, but their bar had a first come, first served policy that had the full menu and we quickly found ourselves a nice table there.
Although Maggiano’s is a national chain, I’d never been and dove right in to the menu head first. I found a few things that looked great and had a hard time narrowing down to an appetizer and main course. Fortunately, I found that one of the main courses I was staring down also repeated as an appetizer. Such genius. This was the four cheese ravioli, mmm four cheeses. These were in some pesto-alfredo sauce with mozzarella. After a little browning in the oven, this ravioli looked great and tasted just as good as it looked. The pesto sauce was nice and creamy and although the marinara sauce was unnecessary, it was nice to feel thought-of.
We headed over to Santa Monica to grab some pizza. Unfortunately, once we had parked and filled the meter, we realized that the pizza place we wanted no longer existed. Unwilling to let a few quarters go to waste, we decided to take a little walk and see if any other restaurant might be able to tickle our fancy. What we found was Spumoni. Though not a pizza place, at least it was Italian.
Not to be confused with C & O Trattoria, C & O Cucina is just down the street in Marina Del Rey. Although the location is completely different, the menu seems to be the same as the other C & O. One thing it is missing, though, is the fun outdoor atmosphere. Nonetheless, I had a restaurant.com gift certificate so I had to try it out.
For a restaurant called the Bottle Inn, you would expect them to have a great selection of wines. What you wouldn’t expect, however, is for their wine cellar to become a dining room. Nonetheless, if you have a big enough group, that is where they seat you. It’s almost like a tease to should you all the amazing wines you could be drinking, yet it’s still pretty damn cool. Although the wine was quite distracting, I was able to take my mind off of it long enough to read the menu.
Everything on the menu looked amazing and it took me a long time to decide, but in the end it had to be the Gnocchi al Pesto. While waiting, we drank some fine Napa wine and stared at the stack of Opus wine that was probably worth more than my life.
Italian food is often a difficult food to spend a lot of money on. It is hard to justify dropping $15 on a meal when I can easily boil pasta, microwave some Classico sauce and sprinkle some parmesan on top. C & O Trattoria, however, is a place that exceeds anything I could provide in my own kitchen.
The ambience itself makes you feel like you really walked into a restaurant in Italy, with outdoor seating, a fountain and strings of lights. Even the walls are painted to make it feel like you are sitting out on the street rather than inside a restaurant. I took my seat and started looking at the menu when the waiter began bringing out my unlimited garlic knots. The waiter could hardly bring them out fast enough for me to eat them.