2 reviews

1. Erik Fremont  

   on March 9, 2015
   

   If you want terrible service, blah (at best) food and overly expensive drinks this is your place, but if those ideas don't appeal to you avoid this place.

   Dinner for 4 of 8 drinks, 4 appetizers and 4 dinners. No desserts and no coffee cost over $250.00. Drinks are $10 and up! And to top it off they weren't good. I do not understand how this place has almost a 5* rating when 2 stars is generous. Avoid this place and you will be better off for it.  I have eaten here before and wasn't blown away, but I had been told to give it another chance mad I did.

   My previous review (See below)

   Food is pretty good, but not amazing. Tough to park. Service is great though. Hate the expensive sodas though.

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2. Thora Stine  

   on May 22, 2015
   

   I see many positive reviews for this restaurant, which makes me think perhaps I caught it on a bad night.  I found the food to be lacking.

   Clams Casino: B
   Pretty good.  The stuffing was savory, the clams were cooked well.  I would've liked to have seen something more interesting done with the clams.  Maybe bits of bacon in the stuffing to help bring out the garlic?

   Tortellini Alfredo: C
   The cheese tortellini was good enough.  Nice buttery flavor, and cooked just the right amount.

   The Alfredo sauce was a train wreck, followed by a funeral, followed by another train wreck.  As I type this, tears of sadness are falling from my cheeks onto the keyboard.

   This Alfredo sauce was much too thin… almost watery.   Watery sauces can support bold flavors like garlic, but they can NOT support cream/butter flavors.  The end result was a watery sauce which has a hollow overtone of butter.

   It should've been easy.  If your Alfredo is thin, what do you do?  You add more Parmesan!  Alfredo is little more than butter, cream, and a whole lot of Parmesan.  Which brings me to another point.  I tasted NO cheese.  None.  Zero.  This leads me to believe one of a few things:

   1. The Alfredo sauce here uses cornstarch or flour as a thickening agent.
   2. Ducale uses Kraft (or some other abomination) Parmesan, which is half cheese wax.

   Additionally, the Alfredo had a very flat linear flavor.  I think adding a hint of fresh garlic would go a long way into making the sauce more dynamic.

   I won't say it's the worst Alfredo I've ever had, because I've had worse (mostly from cans).  The reason why I'm dwelling on this is because bad Alfredo is so pointless and unnecessary.  It's one of the easiest sauces to make.  The ONLY way to screw up Alfredo sauce is by cutting corners.  I'm still giving this dish a C because I thought the tortellini (which is probably frozen) was quite good, and cooked quite well.

   Pasta e Fagioli: D
   The Pasta e Fagioli was not just bland.  It was, quite literally, flavorless.   The Olive Garden, the McDonalds of Italian Cuisine, has a better Pasta e Fagioli.  This was the worst Pasta e Fagioli I've ever had in my life.  No fooling.   What are my gripes?

   A Pasta y Fagioli should be a deceptively complicated soup.  You should have overtones of thyme, oregano, basil.  Some recipes even have vinegar.  Fresh vegetables should make the soup dynamic.  Many recipes use some kind of meat to make the soup more savory.  I tasted nothing in this soup other than bean juice.  The consistency was interesting, and I liked that.  But the flavor was flat and uninteresting.

   Shrimp Parmesan: B-
   Not bad.  Slightly below average.  I'll tell you what I liked.  The mozzarella was a high-quality mozzarella.  Break a piece off and you can tell instantly.  It's a good tasting cheese they use.  The breading also had a nice flavor — it was savory, and folded well with the cheese.  I liked how the dish was cooked.  The end pieces of the mozzarella became that burnt crusty cheese that we all die for when we have really awesome southern Italian food.

   Now I'll tell you the two things which ruined the dish for me.   First, the tomato sauce was MUCH TOO BLAND.  I'm afraid the Europeans are right.  The American palette does not like strong flavors.  I dipped my finger into the sauce.  Nice color, nice consistency.  Wasn't overly sweet (I despise sweet tomato sauces).  But it didn't really taste like a tomato sauce.  In fact, it didn't really taste much like anything.  The missing tomato flavor was like a slap to the face with every bite.  I was painfully aware of it.

   Secondly, there was something about the shrimp that I didn't care for.  I couldn't put my thumb on it until about a second ago, when it hit me like a ton of bricks.  When I was trying to deconstruct the shrimp parmesan to figure out what I liked and disliked, I pulled a shrimp out of the dish and sucked the breading and sauce off it.  It just occurred to me that the shrimp had not been sauteed before being breaded.   Two things should've happened to the shrimp:

   1. The shrimp should've been placed into a plastic bag containing olive oil, crushed garlic and a dash of salt and pepper (and whatever creative thing the chef comes up with on his own) and it should've been left to marinate in the fridge for a few hours.

   2. The shrimp should've been sauteed in garlic, shallots, and olive oil before being breaded.

   Judging from the color and taste of the shrimp without the breading/sauce, it seems like neither was done.  It looks like the shrimp were taken out of a bag, deveined, breaded, and cooked.  Now, this is perfectly OK if you're cooking for yourself and you want to make a super quick and easy meal, but if you're going to serving this at a restaurant, I'm very sorry, but you need to hold yourself to a higher standard and take the extra mile to make the dish more savory and complex.

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