How they get off charging the prices they do is beyond me. The one thing going for my $17 plate of Pappardelle Cinghale was the generous serving of meat (that tasted how I imagine cat food must taste). Despite the server's assurance that the dish would include "lots of mushrooms," every brown morsel I plucked from my plate, thinking, "Ah, some porcini!" turned out to be more overly salty, fatty chunks of pork (wild boar). Though I knew by then that the waiter was thoroughly uneducated about the menu as well as strangely awkward, it was still a little surprising to me when I asked, "Was the meat salt-cured and then rehydrated?" and got a response of, "I don't know. It might be."
I felt terrible about it, but for the first time ever, I sent my order back to the kitchen. While waiting for my new order, I nibbled on bread that tasted like it came to the table right from a grocery store shelf. My replacement dish of pappardelle came quickly and was edible, though the peas and zucchini had had all the color cooked right out of them. Dessert consisted of a sickly sweet chocolate mousse with wet whipped cream and frosty strawberries that betrayed too long a stay in the restaurant refrigerator. In the end, the only thing the place had going for it was the atmosphere and the $16 carafe of very drinkable chianti.
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