Hating on Italian Restaurants
I'll be sleeping with the fishes for this one.
I say this as an Italian-American, but I don’t understand how so many Italian restaurants outside of the tri-state area are either underwhelming or overpriced. If I grab dinner with my girlfriend at an Italian spot, it feels like I spent $60 on food that we could have made just as well (or probably better) at home, or I walk away thinking that was delicious but I’m still a little hungry and I dropped at least $150 on the meal. My current city of residence, Toronto, is woefully oversaturated with these places—just carbon copies of carbon copies of stugot joints that will charge you $27 for a shoelace of cacio e pepe and $9 for table wine. I was also surprised to learn that many Italian places in North America use Barilla. If that’s the case, when I order food at your Italian restaurant, and I pay your dipshit prices, give me two pounds of pasta. You can cheat me on the meatballs or whatever, but give me a soccer ball-sized helping of pasta. Yes, I know this is a spiritually obese take, but it is the correct one. Every now and then, if I’m dumb enough to go to an Italian restaurant, I want to eat Italian food like Tommy Lasorda.
Now that I’m trapped joyfully engaged in a Friday date night at one of these said stugot joints with my girlfriend, I’m having a great time picturing some reedy internet-damaged hypochondriac poking joylessly at their carbonara and pestering the server, “Is it woke? I can’t eat this if it’s woke.” Our meals arrive, and it’s an (allegedly) thousand-layer lasagna, carbonara, a Caprese salad, and a bowl of spaghetti with an oversized meatball. Being the cultural connoisseur that I am, I answer in the affirmative when the server inquires as to whether I’d like extra cheese on my spaghetti. And according to my girlfriend, Just fuck me up is an “inappropriate” response to the server asking me how much cheese would I like.
The waiter diligently grates away at the gargantuan block of parmesan as my girlfriend’s eyebrows flatline into an unimpressed expression that rests between disgust and despair. The waiter’s forearms bulge, all ligaments and obvious veins rising like speed bumps. The flakes of curdled lactose glory pile up into a Himalayan snow top. It’s not enough. It’s never enough.
Only God can judge me—unless my girlfriend is considering leaving me for her kickboxing instructor. Her pent-up scoffing and chiding can no longer be restrained. She outbursts, “You degenerate swine! It’s ‘Fuck me up, PLEASE.’”
I generally agree with you - I don’t often choose to plunk down my $100 at an Italian joint because it seems like a very poor value proposition. But if you’ve ever gone to an amazing Italian place, you’d probably feel differently. They are few and far between these days, and I can’t opine on whether Toronto has any. Oddly enough, my in-laws live in the Mecca of all things tacky (Myrtle Beach, SC) and yet they have an old school Italian joint there with stucco interiors and gaudy statuary, yet everything there tastes amazing and they treat you like royalty from start to finish.
Excellent prose. I’m stealing this —> "The waiter’s forearms bulge, all ligaments and obvious veins rising like speed bumps."