This chain Italian-American restaurant with its tentacles everywhere seems to embody everything that is soulless and wrong with the restaurant business: mass production of family-style food, prioritizing volume over quality, without doing justice to any culinary tradition—not even to the Italian-American one.
Mass-reproduced posters, faux-Old-World memorabilia, and everything else fake-Italian is flaunted at this cluttered mess of a restaurant that pretends to highlight the cuisine of Italy. Buca di Beppo will have your Italian grandmother rolling over in her grave to think that her descendants might be experiencing this as somehow Italian. She’d also be appalled by the behavior of the kids—with all the running, jumping, and screaming, Buca di Beppo can look like a daycare center where the supervisor forgot to show up. Hardly a date spot, this.
The menu is like a roll call of so-called “Italian” dishes that were actually invented in America: chicken parmigiana, fettuccine alfredo, stuffed shells,… [More]
9.3 Chez Roux
9.2 Tony’s
9.1 Catalan
9.0 Dolce Vita
9.0 Feast
9.0 Rainbow Lodge
9.0 Huynh
9.0 Vic & Anthony’s
9.0 Hubcap Grill
Top Tex-Mex: [More]
The new Fearless Critic Portland Restaurant Guide (paperback, 384 pages, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-6081600-4-4) is now available online at Powell’s, Amazon.com, and other local and national bookstores, as well as New Seasons, Whole Foods, and other food and wine stores.
The book features brutally honest full-page reviews of 300 restaurants, coffeeshops, food carts, and food stores in Portland and its suburbs, including Beaverton, McMinnville, and more, plus more than 40 pages of extensive cross-referenced lists, including a special vegetarian dining guide and late-night dining guide.
Each restaurant in the book is rated on a rigorous 1-to-10 scale for food and feel. Reviews are based on the evaluations of an independent team of local food bloggers, food critics, and chefs, who visit restaurants incognito and don’t accept free meals. Fearless Critic is reader-supported, not ad-supported, and we don’t accept print or online ads from restaurants.
Also now live is the online version of the Portland guide offers a complete, searchable database of Fearless Critic ratings and… [More]
The Times of London reports that Italian Minister of Agriculture Luca Zaia has dissolved the mozzarella di bufala campana consortium after a series of inspections revealed that “25 per cent of the cheese sold as buffalo mozzarella was fake because it contained 30 per cent cow milk.” Mozzarella di bufala, with its wonderfully funky water-buffalo-milk notes, is one of the main ingredients in some versions of margherita DOP pizza (although it’s not, as Alan Richman has wrongly stated, a required ingredient). It’s also frequently served raw as an appetizer, either on its own or with ham.
The Italian Ministry of Agriculture has a recent history of operating at the curious intersection of neofascism and culinary purism. Zaia’s “zero-tolerance policy” on food fraud became famous with his 2008 bust-up of cheating Brunello di Monalcino producers, which was hailed as a… [More]
