Pazzo Pazzo Italian Cuisine
10016-103 Ave., 425-7711

One of the reasons people frequently give for not going out for pasta is that you can make the same thing at home for a fraction of the cost. I’m not sure I totally agree with that truism—skill and quality of ingredients go a long way to differentiating homemade spaghetti bolognese or linguine alla vongole from the product of a professional kitchen.

On the other hand, sometimes it takes more than skill and quality ingredients to make you feel like you got your money’s worth out of a restaurant pasta meal.

Take the example of a lone diner strolling into a downtown Italian restaurant he’s never visited before at the tail end of his lunch hour. One server directs him to select his own table in the emptying dining room. Then another server, seeing he’s by himself, sends him off to sit on the unpopulated lounge side with small, unset circular tables and bench seating. This puts him closer to the source of soaring Italian power ballads wafting across the room.

After that, however, the diner seems to have the undivided attention of the server, who quickly extracts his order from the terse bill of fare. He asks for the pasta and salad combo ($17), with fettucine arrabiata and mista salad. To her departing back, he also requests a glass of the house red, a Chilean cabernet sauvignon ($8).

The food arrives fast and huge—a big bowl of greens, a vast platter of fettucine in tomato sauce (to which the server thoughtfully adds fresh ground pepper and grated parmesan) and a sizable mini-loaf of bread divided into thick slices in a basket. The salad is leaf lettuce—dark on the edges from having been cut earlier in the day—doused with red wine vinaigrette and copiously equipped with wedges of tomato, some red onion, and exactly two quarter-moon slices of carrot. There’s a lot of pepper-and-cheese-flecked dressing pooling at the bottom of the bowl—maybe he jokes to himself that he’ll drink the rest of the salad if he has room at the end of the meal.

The fettucine must be homemade—for one thing, it was ready way too quickly to have cooked from dry rigidity, and it has the squared-off edges, light colour, and firmness that bespeak recent passage through a pasta cutter. The tomato-cream sauce, visibly rich and dappled with extra virgin olive oil, has been fortified with a few handfuls of chopped jalapeno pepper, indicating that it lives up to the name “arrabiata,” which is Italian for “angry.” If anything, the sauce is perhaps a touch too angry and this hypothetical diner, predisposed as he is to spicy things, might wish that the occasional centimetre squares of roasted eggplant were as frequent as the fiery doses of capsicum to balance the spiciness.

Once he’s put as much of a dent as he can into the ocean of pasta and sauce and the zingy/soggy salad, our hero puts his plates aside and sets about some personal reflection and note-taking over recent events and conclusions about his own, if not the human, condition. Every time he looks up, his server seems to be eyeing his proximity, her eyebrows hovering ever higher on her forehead.

“So busy you can’t even stop working over lunch hour, er whut?” she inquires at point.

As he jots and lingers over the glass of wine, he becomes increasingly aware that the server seems anxious. When the glass is almost empty, she swoops in and clears it and the water glass she hasn’t refilled through the course of the meal. The next time he looks up, she has her sunglasses perched on top of her head (her expectant eyebrows hover nearby) and has hoisted her considerable handbag onto the counter, an unsubtle signal, perhaps, that her shift is nigh-over and the restaurant about to close for the afternoon. An employee in an apron sits two tables away working over a big plate of food with his hands. The diner pays—according to the bill, if not the server, the arrabiata comes with a $2 surcharge and the final total of $27 (plus tax and tip) seems a touch steep for what was not an extraordinarily elaborate meal for one—and rises to leave, eliciting a final reflexive “thanks” from the server, the sound of the needle on her tank of graciousness hitting E.

If this imaginary solo diner were to have such an experience at a restaurant like Pazzo Pazzo Italian Cuisine, a venue that’s elicited rave reviews from online foodies, would that diner give the place another shot, or would he stick to other Italian restaurants where he feels like he gets better value and more patient service? Alas, we may never know.