Not sure what that title means... oh well.
Well last night we celebrated the official birthday with a dinner out at Ginos, an Italian restaurant in mid town sans Anna-Kate. It was a really nice restaurant from appearances, really reminded me of the amazing Italian restaurants on the Hill in St. Louis, from a decor perspective.
The food on the other hand, not so much. They had good calamari, with amazing marinara however Luciano still holds the world record for best calamari. I like a lightly fried calamari and I want very few "tentacle" ones, I like the circular ones better.
But they had amazing bruschetta, decent rolls, and an ok salad.
This restaurant had two of my biggest pet peeves though. Ginos isn’t' the only place guilty, in fact I'd say 99.9% of restaurants break my two simple rules.
Peeve 1: MAKE YOUR OWN CROUTONS! For crying out loud it’s so simple to make croutons and it’s a nice personal touch. Plus fresh crotons are in my opinion far superior to the box. At panera we made our own croutons and I thought they were fantastic, my favorite crouton to this day.
Peeve 2: Put anchovies on your Caesar salad. The anchovies are a key ingredient for Caesar salads and I can count on my right hand the amount of restaurants I've been too that had anchovies on their Cesar. That or have an anchovies based dressing i.e. oddly enough Panera has an anchovies based Cesar dressing. I don't know what it is but the anchovies, even if you don't eat them, adds so much to the salad itself.
The entrees were pretty good though. I got a veal gorgonzola which sort of tasted like steak and gravy (the dark kind not the breakfast kind). It was good, but not what I was expecting. Very rich too. What also was rich was my side order of garlic butter pasta. Now I like to consider myself a garlic connoisseur... or at least able to eat garlic on just about anything... this pasta was sooooo garlicky it burned my mouth and I had to stop eating it after 2 bites.
Janelle got a creamy shrimp alfredo kind of pasta. It said light cream sauce... it was anything but. That being said it was good but so rich it was hard for her to eat all of her half serving.
All in all the atmosphere was worth it, but the food was just ok. It was neat to see a restaurant not soo trendy in Atlanta. ATL's restaurants are always so yuppyish so it was nice to see an "old fashion" eatery.
We were going to try and make it to the new Bourne movie but we ran out of time.... and were going to try and eat some desert... but ran out of room in the belly so we just went home and called it a night.
A nice night of peace and quiet and a nice meal to celebrate the old 27.
Posted by holtonian at August 21, 2007 03:29 PM | TrackBackI should note that the restaurant is in fact called Ninos not Ginos.
Posted by: Janelle at August 23, 2007 10:31 PM