Audio By Carbonatix
No photos to share right now, dear readers, just a little rant.
The other night I ended up eating dinner at Tutto, the Italian restaurant that Joseph Gutierrez opened in the space that used to be Digestif. I didn’t have an agenda, per se — just was curious to try a few things.
In short, I really miss Digestif.
Not much has physically changed about the place since Peter Kasperski’s groovy beatnik Cal-Ital joint closed and was briefly resurrected up the street until chef Payton Curry left to work for Caffe Boa. The furniture’s the same, those cool lamps above the bar are the same, yadda yadda. They swapped out the retro art and framed album covers for some paintings, and ditched the indie rock for a nauseating soundtrack of instrumental adult contemporary that made me feel like I was eating in a hotel lobby.
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How was dinner? All over the map. Nice dinner rolls — warm, fresh out of the oven, and served with soft butter. Those were followed by bruschetta that was heavy on the raw garlic, and (most confusingly), served on stale, dry slices of bread. Huh? Give me another roll!
My braised rabbit casserole was pretty tasty, with moist, tender meat in tomatoey sauce, although it wasn’t even close to what I imagined. Basically, it wasn’t a casserole at all, just pieces of rabbit leg on a plate with some mashed potatoes and asparagus on the side.
But the kicker was the orechiette with sausage and rapini in cream sauce.
It wasn’t orechiette by a long shot. It was pasta shells.
Un-effing-believable. Where were the little doughy ear-shaped blobs of pasta I was craving? And why did my waiter and the kitchen staff think I was stupid enough not to know that the supposedly “handmade pasta” they sent me was straight-up pasta shells out of the box?
By the time our waiter did come back to see how everything was, quite awhile later, I was even more upset. Did I mention that there were probably only seven other people eating in the restaurant at that time? No excuse for such painfully slow service.
Hell no, I did not stick around to see what Tutto had on the dessert menu.
