Mona Lisa Pasta

Date
4/16/09

Location
In the Preston Square shopping center
931 Preston Avenue

What we ate
Chicken and pepperoni pizza, saffron pasta, squid ink pasta, artichoke pesto sauce, Amatricciana sauce, stuffed grape leaves

Who came
Nora, Matt, Tiff

Website
http://www.monalisapasta.com/pasta.htm

Thoughts
First, a brief explanation of how this WEDS was different from most other WEDS. Passover ended at sundown today. Being Jewish, I have not eaten bread (pizza, pasta, crackers, etc.) since last Wednesday and a gathering for pizza or pasta is the traditional fast-breaking meal. Also, Mona Lisa is a take-out place and specialty grocery combined, not a sit-down place. I took orders, picked up our food, and brought it back to my apartment for relaxed enjoyment.

If you like to cook, especially Italian food, you have to pay a visit. The specialty grocery section is full of great, varied items and will give you a bunch of ideas. In case you want to let someone else do the work, you can take home frozen dishes. Take a look at the menu on the website; I kept reading back and forth across across the ravioli options because there were some great options. A few of the restaurants in Charlottesville who focus on local ingredients use Mona Lisa pasta for their dishes. You can also peruse the sauces and spreads since they're kept in a fridge near the front. The deli section is a little limited in variety, but looks excellent in quality. I was very close to walking out with a ball of smoked mozzarella.

We made it just under the wire for putting in our pizza order and had a little time to deliberate between the pasta options. It's just really cool to have fresh cut pasta and be able to pick both the flavor and the size; it gives you a kind of control over the process you don't get from normal take-out places. Between the different pastas, sauces, pizzas, and sandwiches, Mona Lisa has a nicely varied menu, provided you want Italian food. Hopefully, you wouldn't be there if you weren't in that kind of mood.

Enough of that, time to talk about how the food tasted. The pizza was apparently really good (I didn't have any) and the grape leaves were alright. I don't recall having grape leaves before, so I wasn't sure what to expect. The pasta only takes 90 seconds in boiling water to cook and comes out with a nice al dente texture. The saffron pasta had an awesome smell and, while the flavor was there, it wasn't particularly strong. The squid ink had a slightly stronger taste but would've probably shined a bit more if we paired it with one of the seafood-based sauces. The pesto was garlicky and the artichoke flavor was a bit mild, but it worked well with either pasta. Look for comments from the other three about the pizza and Amatricciana sauce.

Overall
Pros - Great selection, tons of options, easy preparation, tasty food
Cons - Some flavors were a little too weak for my liking
Overall - Really good food. If you need a specialty item from the grocery section for your own dish or just want some good Italian food at home without much work, this is definitely your place.