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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
So... the first WEDS I have attended in a while.. I'd always wanted to try this place... I decided because of color scheme to pair the red sauce with the yellow and the black with the white sauce because I thought it would look better. the yellow red combination was yummy... I liked that the pasta was flavored... but I did not really like the inky black pasta or the white sauce.... even though it WAS more visually appealing than the black pasta with white.... Yes, I do like my food to be pretty. The grape leaves were yummy... and.. the pizza was good.. but nothing too spectacular... the winner for me was definitely the red sauce with the yellow noodles... I would also like to note that this blog should also highlight noteable dinner conversation... this night was filled with foreskins.... zombie frogs... dwarf puffers... the relation between soap and candy corn.... scav hunt videos... and. ... that's all I can remember right now...
The pizza was amazing when it was piping hot, but when it got cooler it was simply pretty good. I really liked the amatriciana and the pesto, which is saying something because (and Steve can tell you I go on and on about this) I'm just Italian enough to be able to make some really good sauces and thus I'm incredibly picky about my Italian food. The pesto was nice and garlicky, but I wished it had pine nuts. The amatriciana had a mild anise flavor, possibly fennel, which was a nice compliment to the pork sausage but not overpowering the other flavors. I loved the fresh pasta. Fresh pasta is just better and I'm certainly not going to be making it myself. I'm eager to try their ravioli and other pasta flavors. The grape leaves were pretty good, just like most grape leaves you can get at other decent restaurants around town. Not the best you can get on the planet, but better than College Inn or that place that used to be in the old Hardee's. The cannoli was disappointing; despite making their own pasta and ravioli the shell and filling for the cannoli were from a package. So does their gnocchi, but I can't blame them for that.
As Steve said, the cool part was the fact that this place is a market/deli. It's like what you might get in a more urban location with an Italian immigrant population, only on a smaller scale. Impressive for Charlottesville, but it would look kind of weak in Pittsburgh or Baltimore, let alone NYC or the streets of Italy. They had a wide variety of all the dry and canned ingredients you would need in just about any Italian dish. They also had bread which we didn't try but they have samples of it and various oils and pestos regularly. They have a few cheeses and meats fresh, like capicolla and salami, fresh ricotta and mozarella, but just a few. I think the trick with that would be to go in and see what they had fresh rather than trying to find a particular kind. All the varieties of pizza sounded great, but I'd recommend lunch and by the slice rather than dinner where you can only get rather expensive whole pizzas or the slices that have been sitting out for a long time.
Long review short: Impressive for a town Charlottesville's size, even as yuppie as it is, but not as impressive as I've seen in Little Italies. I want to try more, and it's certainly different than other places in town.
Oh man, I forgot to say they have a good selection of Italian beverages too! Not huge, but again, impressive for Charlottesville.
Post a Comment