A Nice Place to Live, But I Wouldn't Want to Visit There

 for maximum coherence, read all the posts from this trip in order, starting with THIS ONE.

After a day off from touristic pursuits (to do laundry, shop and watch a soccer match on TV), we took a day trip up to Vancouver, British Columbia. We drove inland to the border crossing north of Lynden, Washington (where there was no delay to get across) and went by the set of the current television show "Bates Motel," which airs on some cable channel. (We had thought it was the set of the movie Psycho when we planned the excursion, not having carefully read the place description on line.) Then we headed into the city.

Let me pause here for a brief product review. Our anemic rented Nissan Rogue comes with a GPS Navigation system proprietary to Hertz Car Rental. I would not have thought it possible that I could be persuaded that the ancient first-gen navigator on my own convertible was anything but the most annoying and tedious piece of vintage technology. Now I know better. Hertz's "NeverLost" machine, like my ancient navigator, seems not to know about many roads built in the last 15 years. My machine has the excuse that its information comes to it on old DVDs; but Hertz's is constantly updated. (We know this because every now and then it would announce that it has been updated.) 

Hertz's NeverLost device is slow to respond to input on its touchscreen. You put in a letter (having to spell everything) and it registers, but you don't know that it registers so you put it in again, and then it responds. Twice. So you have to back up. That usually involves starting over. Sometimes you touch one character and it registers a different one; and you have to back up. Or start over. And even more irritating is that the device will not allow you to orient the map with north at the top (unless you zoom out so far as to make the map pointless); it insists on having the direction of travel at the top, so the map is always rotating and you can't tell at a glance if you're going the way you want (and many times, you aren't). Most irritating of all is that the machine won't simply show you a map of where you are; it will only show programmed routes. Given the slowness of the machine, and its failure to deal well with missed turns and changed plans, it is all but useless in tight city driving; of which there is plenty in a place like Vancouver. 

(I also get irked at the crass commerciality of the system. It takes a long time to come on every time you start the car, at least in part so that it can give you options of finding "Popular Chains" -- outlets for companies that have paid Hertz for advertising; and its "Explore" option lists only the few half-assed tourist destinations that, similarly, have paid for the privilege of being represented. If Hertz had its customers' interests anywhere in the forward part of its collective corporate mind, it would at least show the destinations clients might actually want to explore ... like Stanley Park or the Queen Elizabeth Gardens. But there's no direct money in customer satifaction, is there?)

Vancouver skyline

After a long (and unnecessary) wander through city streets (thanks to the NeverLost Navigator's inexplicable routings), we finally gave up on technology and just went to the freeway into Vancouver. Our first stop was Queen Elizabeth Gardens, which occupy the highest point in Vancouver and have both beautiful landscaping and excellent views over the city. We spent the better part of an hour up there, then drove into the heart of the city. (Using printed maps for navigation, we got where we wanted to go with only the normal traffic troubles.) By this time we all wanted lunch, so we parked on a sidestreet near a corner where we were offered the choices of Greek, Thai, Vietnamese and Irish-Pub cuisines. We did not choose wisely. The first three were all storefronts, mom-and-pop places; the Irish Pub, Cieli's, was large and a little upscale, just to the point of being flashy. We chose the Irish Pub, part (it turns out) of a chain of such places.

The bartender greeted us cheerfully, and then was never seen again. It being another gorgeous day, we wanted to sit outside, but they only had two-tops there, so we pulled up to a high table just inside the wide open doors. Naturally there were televisions all over the place, so we couldn't entirely avoid watching; but at least they were showing British sports, such as you might have to see in an Irish prison: darts on one screen, golf on the other. (Darts, it seems, is as abstruse as cricket. Scores seem to go up and down at random, and we couldn't tell just by watching whether a throw was good, or otherwise.) Our waitress brought menus and drinks quickly. So far, so good.

The menu includes such overpriced traditional Irish fare as sliders, flatbreads and nachos. These are the things we ordered. (As Hispanics have moved farther and farther north, I have more or less rescinded my rule against eating Mexican food north of Round Rock, but then, this wasn't really Mexican food. Let's call it cucina-inspired.) Church Lady and the Perfesser both went for the pulled-pork sliders. They report that the little burgers had good flavour but not a particularly good texture, neither moist nor dry, just vaguely unsatisfying: too little meat, too little slaw, too much bread.  "Disappointing" was the word used twice.

Buttermilk's flatbread was better. It had a topping of pulled pork with pineapple salsa and jalapeños on a crispy layer of bread. The topping was adequate in quantity, though more meat would have been unobjectionable, and the crust maintained its integrity throughout the meal.

My nachos were interesting. They were made from a number of small tortillas, cut in half and fried, then stacked in a jumble on a plate. Toppings of meat (pulled pork again), corn, onions, peppers and jalapeños were scattered across it, then dosed with a drizzle of sour cream. The menu referred to "lots of cheese" on the dish. There was, arguably, the promised amount of cheese, but it was mostly in one part of the plate, as though the arm doing the scattering of ingredients had tired towards the end and just abandoned the effort. Because of the interlacing of the nacho chips, the dish was a little hard to eat, but that produced the rare yet desireable result of allowing me to finish lunch after the Perfesser, who is reknowned for his deliberate approach to meals.

What does that mean?

We almost didn't learn any of this about the food at Cielli's, because the service was so very bad. (I was reminded of a rude comment of a friend, years ago in Mexico, who told a waiter that we had received lo mas pinche servicio. It would have applied here, but we were all too polite to express ourselves except through the gratuity.) We did not get our food before we had reached the point of calculating how much we should leave for the drinks if we walked out. It was easily a half hour between ordering and serving, during which time we learned nothing about darts scoring either. It would have helped our mood, to say nothing of the tip, if our waitress had come by to check on us during that long wait, or to let us know there would be a delay. Instead, she studiously avoided so much as looking in our direction; she devoted herself to the farther sides of the room, the exterior tables, and the areas behind the kitchen door. She was not a good waitress.

pretty building, not much inside

After lunch came another disappointment: we went to the MacMillan Space Center. At ten bucks a head (the senior rate) for the admission, plus $5.75 a head for the planetarium show, we were expecting significantly more. But then, we're all grown-ups, and this place is clearly aimed at ten-year-olds with a reasonable vocabulary; a fact we think should have been mentioned in the descriptions on line and in our guidebooks. The exhibit halls, which are not extensive, contain some photographs and video recordings relating to space flight, along with a number of hands-on exhibits that have suffered much from having too many hands on. 

The planetarium show was just okay. The people behind it seem to be too enthralled with their new equipment to consider in any depth what people, especially grown people such as their audience, might like to see; and the gradeschool questions thrown out for the audience ("What do you know about Mars?") were tired and uninteresting, as well as being largely ignored by the sparse crowd. (I finally started responding just to get the show moving.) 

We went from there out to Stanley Park. Let me tell you, Vancouver is not a city with a happy relationship with cars. At 3:00 on a weekday, you expect a certain amount of traffic in the center of any large city, but Vancouver has given itself over entirely to pedestrians and bicycles, to the point where lines of cars waiting to turn right -- right, mind you -- stretch back for blocks, because only one car can get through the throng of the crosswalks on each signal's cycle. They seem also to randomly select streets to serve as pedestrian malls. In the end it took us about 45 minutes to go the 4 1/2 kilometers (2 1/2 miles) from the space place to Stanley Park. 

Stanley Park is huge, and popular with locals. For tourists, it's not so great. It's so big that you can't walk from one part to another without repeatedly paying the typical exorbitant parking rates. It's so poorly marked that we didn't find the many sites we had wanted to see there, settling in the end for the wildlife of the Lost Lagoon (which we found right off; I guess it's only lost because nobody's looking for it, and I understand why), consisting of lots of racoons and ducks, a few other birds, a squirrel and -- surprisingly -- a coyote; all of whom seemed to want to be fed (except, thankfully, the coyote, which was happy to just chew on himself); and the waterfront view of the Lions Gate Bridge, mainly of interest for the forest of kelp floating along the shore. On our way out of the park, we passed Sunset Beach, which we had intended to visit later on because our guidebook called it "a less populated beach." That must mean it is less crowded than Times Square on New Year's Eve, because it was packed four hours before sunset. We quietly dropped that plan and headed on to Canada Place, which was mildly interesting and slightly informative with its postings on Canadian history; and we drove by the Gastown Steam Clock --- it was too congested to stop, but we got a good long look and a decent picture out the car window while waiting for crosstraffic; we had a stop sign, they didn't.

From there we headed up to Lynn Canyon, a public park on the far side of the Burrard Inlet, in North Vancouver. We spent a happy couple of hours traipsing up and down the trails and across the suspension bridge rigged over the creek.

By then it was time for dinner. I had located -- on Roadtrippers.com, a trip-planning website that I heartily recommend -- a strip of local shops, clubs and restaurants on Commercial Drive, and we headed down there, parked, and explored the area on foot. It is, as described, a collection of funky bars and clubs, many with live music; ethnic restaurants; and shops featuring all manner of oddities. As the neighbourhood evolved from Italian to ethno-mix, big chains have made some unwelcome inroads; there's a Starbucks and a Tim Horton's, and more necessary installations like banks and pharmacies. But it still maintains a unique localist vibe that we enjoyed experiencing, even so briefly. We chose an Italian restaurant called Arriva, which had a sort of faded-glory feel overall. The service was on the Little-Italy-New-Yawk model: cadre-style, professional and just a little sassy. It was good for the most part, but one of the three servers seemed to have acquired the knack of appearing to give good service while not actually doing anything. When we asked for another basket of bread his response was, "Absolutely, but it'll be just a moment." It never came, until we asked another server for the same thing. (His response was, "Absolutely. Immediately." And he brought it.) The food came quickly enough to please us (especially after the godawful service we'd had at lunch; see above) and we tucked into spinach tortellini, sole florentine, and ravioli. 

What does that mean?

I didn't try the ravioli, so I can only say that it reportedly was very good. I did try the tortellini alla panna and can confirm that it was excellently made, robust and excellently seasoned with a rich cream sauce. I had the sole florentine, one of the day's specials: a filet of sole cooked in white wine until just the slightest crispiness began to form along the edge, then topped with spinach wilted with sautéed garlic in a white wine reduction. It was nicely presented with roasted potato quarters and crunchy-crisp sautéed vegetables. A glass of house white wine was an excellent accompaniment. Really, the only thing about the food that was the least bit below standard was that bread, a reasonably fresh focaccia with a lightly oiled texture on top but just the slightest dryness overall. Hardly worth mentioning, but I can't resist grousing about something. Not entirely.

What's that mean?

We followed this up with a stop for gelati at Caffe Calabria, which calls itself the oldest Italian cafe in Vancouver. Who knows? Who cares. What I know is it has a tremendous display of Italian deli items, gelati, and baked goods. Oh, the baked goods! How hard was it to resist those! But I did, and settled for a double-scoop of the gelato tornado, which the counter clerk thought of as being like cotton candy. Other than being very sweet, it was nothing like cotton candy. It was indescribable. It was fabulous. It was rich, and luscious; it was the Jennifer Lawrence of gelato. (The Tiger Tiger, an orange and licorice flavour, was also very good, and that from someone who doesn't like licorice.) The gelati at Caffe Calabria have the additional distinction of being just about the only thing we found in all of Vancouver that we didn't consider overpriced.

In the end, our day in Vancouver was nice, putting aside the delay getting back across the border at Blaine. But the high prices, the heavy traffic congestion, the difficulty in getting around in the central part of town make me confident that I'm unlikely to ever return. The border-crossing issues all but ensures that.

Grandma Lives!

Audie's Restaurant
314 North Nicolet
Mackinaw City, Michigan

We opted for dinner at this local family-style place at the recommendation of our hotelier. The ambience is middle-class-comfortable, clean and well-maintained, not the least bit pretentious or trendy. Solid and reliable, I suppose,  are the adjectives they're going for, and they succeed.

They have a full bar, and my driving obligations for the near term consisted only of the three-block trek along near-deserted streets, so my friend Kirby went for a vodka martini (yes, yes, I know: if it's not gin it's not a martini. Pace, fellow curmudgeons), while I did the beer thing. Since they actually carry my favourite brand (Killian's Irish Red, in case anybody's looking to supply my wants), it put me in a rare good mood.

The menu carries all the usual stuff for this type of restaurant, although the heavy presence of smelt and whitefish is a local thing. Those breeds of fish are, along with midges, the main foodstuffs produced locally. Kirby chose chicken primavera, one of the day's specials, while I picked lasagna after being assured that it was made in-house.

The house salad I got as a first course didn't bode well for the evening's experience. Not that anything was wrong with it; it was just ordinary salad mix pulled by the handful from a big plastic bag, then decorated with a sprinkle of cheddar cheese and a couple of rings of red onion so it would look, you know, like they really made the effort back in the kitchen. The honey mustard dressing on the side was thick and tangy, and the salad ingredients were reasonably fresh, so it gets a passing grade. (Kirby got a trip to the salad bar with his meal, and fussed about having to do the work himself while I got mine delivered. He has been learning to grouse from me for several years now.) The rolls served with the salads barely pass, being the kind that come in a big pan, are heated in the kitchen, and dry out as quickly as they cool.

What's that mean?

The chicken primavera was a little heavy on the alfredo sauce, but otherwise somewhere between good and superior. Lots of vegetables -- asparagus, cauliflower, mushrooms, squash and green beans -- mixed with rotini underlay a nicely grilled chicken breast. It was served with a heavily buttered slice of garlic bread, and nearly proved to be too much for one person to eat.

But the star attraction (in addition to excellent service overall) was the lasagna. I would not have expected to find a lasagna in an out-of-the-way burg like Mackinaw City, Michigan, that could rival my grandmother's excellent, excellent version, but there it is. A large bowl of noodles still al dente despite who knows how long warming in the kitchen, interspersed with layers of cheese and meat and topped with a tomato-based sauce that was seasoned to shocking perfection. Magnifico! And it was such a large portion that I have enough for a second meal, although the lack of a refrigerator in my motel room probably will defeat that plan, and it will go to waste with my fullest regrets. Unless I eat it now....

The prices were pretty good, even by my miserly South-Texas standards: entrées are ten bucks or less, and drinks prices are moderate.  All in all, a solid three and a half chili peppers out of five.

Please Leave Your Shotgun At the Door

Necce
311 Main Avenue, South
Park Rapids, Minnesota

Park Rapids is a small western-Minnesota town that seems to be trying to position itself as a sort of flatlands Aspen: a year-round resort town, with attractions for the rod-and-gun set in summer, and the snowmobile crowd in winter. (Skiing, other than the cross-country version, is pretty well out of the question.) In aid of that aura, the new Italian place in town is trying to go a little upscale. There are some kinks to work out, but it's promising none the less.

The dining room's look and feel illustrates the difficulties, with its uneasy blend of rusticity and elegance. There are, I know, ways to combine those two themes, often involving expensive furnishings modelled on rural European styles, but the up-country Nordic look doesn't quite manage it. The lighting is tricky in this space, because of large windows overlooking the street, only partially subdued by draperies. Christmas lights, white around the edge and coloured down the middle of the ceiling, lend some atmosphere if one doesn't look too closely; tea lights on the tables give a hint of romance, and wall sconces on a dimmer switch complete the arrangement, but require monitoring as the outside light changes. Some of the tables have unwieldy braces occupying the space normally meant for knees, which makes sitting at them a challenge for all but the smallest people: those who can sit comfortably in the back seat of a Karmann Ghia or Jaguar convertible. The chairs are stunningly heavy, and really too large for the tables; they make it impossible to get oneself positioned at table with any kind of grace; though, once you've managed to get yourself in, it might amuse you to watch others trying to accomplish the same jerky motions without upsetting the table. Just remember: you'll still have to back yourself out of your place before leaving, so you'll want to not laugh out loud.

The service is so-so. Most of the staff are as new as the restaurant, and have apparently been told that good waiters at upscale restaurants have to be supercilious enough to say things like "Monsieur has just ordered a broiled tractor" without any evident humour. They'll get over that, and by that time they will probably have learned enough about the restaurant's menu and style to be knowledgeable and helpful. For now, though, they're just obsequious, uneasy and pretentious, but competent enough in the actual chore of waiting at table.

What does that mean?

Both our meals started with house salads, fresh and interesting, with a single crouton large enough to use by hand, obviating the need for bread with the course. The house dressing, a slightly sweet oil and vinegar, was excellent. My main dish was lasagna, baked in an individual high-sided square dish. This made for an unusually large serving, and a pleasant crustiness to the cheese around the edges; but the height of the dish's sides made it a little difficult to get at the contents, and the small elegance of the method could not counter the innate dryness of the food itself. While the seasonings were good, even very good, the overarching characteristic of the meal was that dryness.

With my friend's meal, the opposite was the case. His sausage manicotti was surprisingly oily. It, too, came as a large serving in an individual baking dish, this one low-sided and oval, so it was much easier to eat than the lasagna. It was served extremely hot, and because of the thick layer of cheese (which I hesitate to criticize; it is, after all, cheese) it took a long time to cool enough to avoid burning. On that dish, too, the seasoning was excellent, particularly that contained in the Italian sausage; and once it had sat long enough to be edible, it proved to be the more enjoyable of the two dishes.

The prices at Necce were very good, even by my South-Texas standards. Given the ambitions of the restaurant, they were a pleasant surprise, and left me with a favourable opinion of the entire experience.



Dinner in the Far North

Spot on 53
1801 2nd Avenue, East
International Falls, Minnesota

(U.S. 53, south of 17th Street)

Even at the height of the summer tourist season, the choices available to the would-be diner in International Falls on a Monday night are limited. We almost passed this place by, because from the outside it looked for all the world like a dive. Stepping inside, we were not immediately reassured, as the dining room was dark. There were, though, some respectable-looking people at tables in the bar, so we joined them in what proved to be a comfortable, well-lit and well-decorated room, with a quiet murmur of conversation providing the background.

What does that mean?

Monday nights are pasta nights at the Spot: of the six pasta dishes selling for fourteen to eighteen dollars on the regular menu, four are available on an all-you-can-eat basis, for eleven dollars; and patrons can mix and match. One of the four offerings was unavailable, a pasta dish made with butternut squash. Since it was so early in the evening when we arrived, I have to  think they didn't get their squash shipment in. But that wasn't a problem, since the other three choices were all higher on my list of preferences anyway. My friend chose the white wine chicken over penne; I picked a tomato-based sauce (I forget what it was called) with chicken, over capellini.

If I were only rating the place on the white wine pasta, I'd have to give it a higher rating by half a chili pepper. That dish was superior, with a discernible wine flavour in a smooth cream sauce that was neither too thin nor too thick. The strips of chicken breast were obviously out of a bag, no doubt delivered frozen, but otherwise the dish was well-made and thoroughly enjoyable.

But the other dish was ordinary in every way. The angel hair pasta was overcooked and the same frozen chicken strips were used; but worse, the sauce was both watery and bland. When it came time to re-up, I asked for a half-order of the white wine chicken pasta.

Both dishes were served with breadsticks that varied from warm and soft to stale and hard.



What Might Have Been

Mandola's Italian Market
4700 West Guadalupe
Austin

(near where Guadalupe joins Lamar)

There was a time when I would have gone to Austin for no reason, just to hang out there. Now, though, I have to have a reason. The reason I had this time was about as flimsy as they come, but it was good enough. The day promised to be just barely warm enough (eventually) to drop the top on the ol' roller skate, so I collected my sidekick from his house out in Loopland and we scooted up the road to the Big City.

Before going, though, I made a survey of the relevant pages on Urbanspoon, to pick a restaurant for lunch in that  increasingly unfamiliar land of New Age trend-whores. Mandola's was one of six I chose, and in the end it was the one we opted to sample, largely because its description reminded me of the Central Grocery, in New Orleans, an old Italian market on Decatur Street, in the Vieux Carré, that I used to visit in ancient times. I recalled the fantastic atmosphere of that place: the sounds of people speaking in French, Italian, English and Spanish, often within the same sentence; the exotic goods stacked high on tables and crammed into shelves; and most importantly the aromas. There is probably no finer memory for a prepubescent New Orleans boy than the spicy aromas of the Central Grocery. 

But I think there must be something wrong with me.

It's ironic, because my friend Rick has been complaining for weeks now about his sinus condition, what with the belated advent of our Mountain Cedar Allergy Season: but he walked into Mandola's Italian Market and was positively wrapped up in the jumble of smells. I, whose sinuses refuse to acknowledge mountain cedar or any other pollen, could smell ... nothing. Nothing at all. No oregano, no rosemary, no comino, no yeasty bread smells, no spaghetti sauce bubbling in the kitchen, no scent of onions and peppers and beef and sausage and cheese. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Mandola is located in one of those brand-spankin'-new mixed-use developments, combining ground-level commercial space with residential space above; the kind of development meant to evoke a time when there really weren't any isolated commercial areas, where whole cities were flats above shops. It's an attractive enough development in a sterile, out-of-the-catalogue way. Very nearly the same development, in different brick, was built across the road from the Quarry in San Antonio, and another permutation of it slouches along 281 near the big new golf resort. This one in Austin seems to be on a different scale, though; kind of like that reproduction of the Oval Office down at the LBJ Library, done ninety percent of actual size. The parking spaces seem tight, the roadways narrow, the doorways not quite as wide as in the Real World. In actuality, they're just as wide as anywhere else, so it must be something about the air in Austin that makes me feel so confined. Odd, that.

The place consists, essentially, of two rooms: a glass-walled dining room of distressed tables with no-frills (but comfortable) chairs, a drinks station and a wait-station; and a shop room, with a small bakery, gelateria, deli and market, and a counter where one orders to dine in. It all looks very nice. The shelves are stocked with things Italian; the breads are fresh, the gelato is home-made, the pastries are ... utterly, utterly gorgeous. There are a few tables in there, too, with no crowding. 

But no smells. Nothing.

I chose a small salad and lasagna, a good dish to evaluate an Italian restaurant on. I'm intimately familiar with lasagna through a lifetime's consumption, and I know what a good lasagna tastes like, and looks like, and feels like, and smells like. Rick ordered an appetizer of calamari and zucchini, and a chopped antipasto salad.

It was warm enough, by then, to have been a good day to dine al fresco, but all the outside tables were taken, and the people there had that look that says it would take heavy ordnance to dislodge them. Not wanting to make such a scene, we found a table in the main dining room and compared my sensory deprivation to Rick's overload. Before long, a waiter brought my salad and a basket of foccacia.

The salad, I will say, was good. The ingredients were perhaps as fresh as any can be, short of chowing down on them in the field. The dressing, a traditional oil-and-vinegar Italian, was tangy, and applied with a deft hand. There was enough of it to flavour every bite, but not so much that it pooled in the bowl or dribbled onto clothing and table. The bread, on the other hand, was a disappointment. It was barely adequately baked, and while light and spongy, as it should be, it seemed to lack any flavour at all. I suspect, though, that if I had invested the necessary time to assemble a plate of oil and spices for dipping, it would have been an altogether more pleasant accompaniment; as it was, it was just bread.

The other dishes we ordered arrived all at once. We shared the calamari and zucchini, which filled a dinner sized plate. The calamari was expertly done, avoiding that rubbery texture that is so often the fate of fried squid, and the zucchini was coated in the same lightly seasoned batter. The marinara sauce that accompanied the dish, though, was a letdown, being entirely too bland to be of use except as (unnecessary) moisturizer.

What's that mean?

Sadly, that same bland marinara sauce covered my lasagna. Because of my seeming insensitivity to aroma, I had Rick confirm that it had, essentially, no aroma. It was tomato sauce with a little parsley in it; I could taste no other seasoning. This was particularly sad because, otherwise, the lasagna would have been excellent: a good-sized portion, with plenty of tasty meat and cheese in layers with perfectly cooked pasta.

Rick's salad was the best of the dishes we ordered. It had plenty of that same crispy Romaine lettuce, with two meats, two kinds of cheese, three kinds of beans, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, pickled onions and peppers, and diced heart of palm, all covered with an excellent creamy dressing. If I were rating only that, Mandola's Italian Market would qualify for a bold-faced listing in my index. As it is, though, it gets the equivalent of a C.

Dining Out in Kansas City

Accurso's Italian Food
4980 Main Street
Kansas City, Missouri

It's just a guess, but I suspect that as you move away from the heart of Country Club Plaza, prices get better and the snob factor declines in inverse proportion. Accurso's is just far enough from that point of overpriced snobbery that the prices are acceptable even to this miserly curmudgeon, while the snoot-elevation was still sufficient to lend an air of sophistication.

We were surprised to be seated right away, at 7pm on a Friday evening — but judging from the many restaurants we passed on our way here, no one goes out on the Friday of a three-day weekend in Kansas City.  I celebrated this unexpected bit of lagniappe with a glass of wine, an inexpensive and unpretentious Riesling that I really enjoyed. We started with the antipasto sampler, tasty and easily large enough for four people: artichoke hearts, olives, salami, provolone, capicola, mozzarella, pepperoni and tomatoes slathered in way too much balsamic vinegar and olive oil. 

What's that mean?

The dishes we ordered were lasagna, ravioli raphaela, and two of that evening's specials: stuffed rigatoni in a cream sauce, and tuna steaks on capellini. Of those four, only the tuna would seem to match the promise of the restaurant's atmosphere and reputation. It was excellent, cooked to within a hair's breadth of perfection, with a delicious light sauce. The stuffed rigatoni was cooked al dente but seasoned with an overdose of salt, and an underdose of stuffing in the pasta (and what there was, was bland). The ravioli raphaela was plentiful but, sadly, uninteresting, to the point where I actually left a good portion of it uneaten, and didn't take it home for leftovers, a shocking behavioural abnormality that should speak volumes. The lasagna was either okay or lousy, depending on which you accept of the four opinions it produced at our table. My own thought was that it was just okay, though the sauce relied too much on mere tomato flavour. The link of dry Italian sausage served with it was grilled well beyond expectation but not quite beyond acceptability.