When I was little, my favorite restaurant was Olive Garden. To my youthful, inexperienced self, there was nothing better than the unlimited salad, hot breadsticks, and heaping portions of pasta that Olive Garden served. Now, I’m older and know better than to waste my money on the limp salad and characterless pasta that Olive Garden puts out (although, I must admit, I’m still partial to their breadsticks), and I have this constant dream of finding the charming family-run Italian-American restaurant serving fresh pasta with friendly service, the local institution that you take your family to for a casual but delicious meal.
Unfortunately, the local, family-run Italian-American restaurants that I’ve ended up eating at have just made me sad, and while I know that the good ones must be out there somewhere, sometimes it feels as though the bad ones outnumber them a million to one. I have higher standards for Italian-American food than I do for other cuisines because I feel as though I can easily cook decent Italian-American food at home (and for less money too), so I’m more likely to be disappointed by mediocre food.
After we went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival, we spent a couple hours shopping at the nearby Gilroy Premium Outlets, and we found ourselves hungry again on the way home from Gilroy. After debating several options in the car, someone suggested Italian food and another had heard that Frankie, Johnnie, & Luigi Too! in Mountain View was good, so we decided to give it a shot. About an hour after we left Gilroy, we made it to Castro Street in Mountain View (I love Castro Street and the restaurants in Mountain View, by the way), and we thought we were close to the restaurant, but unfortunately we then made a huge mistake. Because we didn’t know exactly where the restaurant was, we typed the name into a GPS and started following the directions, which first led us away from Mountain View. I was a bit puzzled as we kept driving away from Mountain View, since a coupon we had said that the restaurant was fifteen minutes from Stanford and we were already farther than fifteen minutes away and were contining to go in the opposite direction, but I just assumed we had an extremely stupid GPS that didn’t know how to plan routes.
Ten minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot of Frankie, Johnnie, & Luigi Too!, and we were still puzzled as to why we had driven so far. We entered the restaurant, and while waiting for the hostess to seat us, we spotted on the menu that Frankie, Johnnie, & Luigi Too! had three locations in northern California, and soon after, we had our suspicions confirmed by the hostess: we had ended up driving all the way to the San Jose location after being just minutes away from the Mountain View one! We all had a big laugh but were too tired and too hungry to really care.
I ordered spaghetti with bolognese sauce, one of the cheapest entrees at $8.95, and one that I thought couldn’t be messed up. After placing our orders, a basket of hot rolls and garlic butter was delivered and, despite being a little tired of garlic by this point, the rolls and butter were delicious. The rolls seemed fresh baked and were an excellent combination of crusty outside and soft inside, and the fluffy garlic butter gave it a nice boost. After eating the bread, I perked up a little: maybe this restaurant, despite its dated, drab, and old-fashioned decor, would be different from the other terrible Italian-American restaurants that I had been to! Then our orders came.
I ordered bolognese sauce with my spaghetti, and while I was not expecting an authentic ragù, I was certainly not expecting what I received. I was a bit stunned, actually, that they called the sauce a bolognese sauce, as it was 99% marinara sauce with maybe half a gram of meat bits hidden in the bright red sauce. At first I thought they had made a mistake, but then, after much searching, I unearthed a miniscule blob of meat, and as I assumed they would not be so careless as to have meat in a marinara sauce that vegetarians might order, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to pretend I was eating a nice, meaty sauce. If the so-called bolognese sauce had been tasty, I might have been able to excuse its lack of meat, but canned Ragu sauce would have tasted just as good; it was too sweet, too salty, dull, and lazy. The spaghetti itself was cooked well, and the dish did not taste bad, but if I’m expected to pay $12, including tax and tip, for a plate of spaghetti I could have made myself with a canned sauce, then I’d better get a heaping mound of noodles that I can’t finish, not the medium-sized plate I received.
Frankie, Johnnie, & Luigi Too! was just one more failed episode in my increasingly frustrating search for a decent Italian-American restaurant, and it felt all too similar to the rest - overpriced, uninspired food. I don’t expect Italian-American restaurants to astound me with innovation or creativity, because there’s a lot to be said for classics like spaghetti with meatballs, chicken parmigiana, and fettucini alfredo, but I do expect good food at reasonable prices, and for some reason, this seems to be incredibly difficult for restaurants to get right. I’m not going to write off Italian-American restaurants completely, because I know that restaurants where the owners and chefs are still motivated to put out great Italian-American food are out there somewhere, but as I keep getting disappointed, the harder it gets to stay excited about going to Italian-American restaurants.
