Service with a sneer

I admit that the reason I generally won't go to an Italian restaurant (Sotto Sotto being an exception), it that I associate Italian-American food too much with Olive Garden. Olive Garden, in my pretentious Viognier swigging foie gras eating mind, is the epitome of staid suburban mediocrity in food and in life. I blame the Will and Grace episode "I never promised you an Olive Garden" for entrenching this in my imagination. I am an unabashed foodie, snob, geek, whatever and since I'm not Italian and have never had grandmother's lasagna, I don't get the big deal. Again, I have had "snooty" Italian and find it very good but since most of the places calling themselves Italian have the spaghetti and meatballs line-up- I simply don't care.

We tried Tutto Pasta on State Street for lunch one day having not heard anything bad about it. Let's start my rant with the fact that as soon as we walked in, we felt like we had interrupted some extremely important standing around time of the staff. After being ignored at our table for close to 10 minutes with Drew getting more and more pissed, we were brought water with ice (no I don't like ice in my water when it 15F outside) in plastic glasses. The cheap local beer was $5 on draft, for Atlanta thats high-end but for Madison its nuts to pay that much for Spotted Cow. Bud was $3.50. Mediocre wines like Ecco was about $8 a glass. So no booze today.

The best part comes when our bread is literally tossed on the table without a word. I giggled and resigned myself at that point to a $30 object lesson.

At least the food didn't suck...entirely. The bruschetta may have been cold, but at least the ingredients tasted fresh. We ordered specials; a cheese ravioli in a tomato sauce, and a chicken in an alfredo-ish sauce with veggies, pistachios, cranberries. The ravioli, chicken, and veggies in cheese sauce were all either canned or frozen. The tomato sauce was homemade with fresh garlic, basil, and tomatoes- it was quite nice. The flavor combination of the pistachio, cheese, and cranberries was nice as well. Immediately after eating, we did get garlic burps since you MUST have a ton of garlic in Italian food right?

I never leave crappy tips. But getting ignored, being made to feel like I was putting out the staff, and the bread-tossing all added up to a small tip. Lesson learned.