Sunday, March 28, 2010

This is IT-ALY!

So, we decided to go out for lunch yesterday. To a new restaurant that's opened on Antigua Street at the top of Leith Walk.
This place has a long, long history of failed enterprises. Many different types of restaurant have come and gone, most of them only managing six months or so of actual trading. The thing is, it's directly across the road from a whole slew of well-established eateries - off the top of my head, I can list three or four Italian places, a fish place, a Thai place, and a Nepalese place (which, incidentally, does a great lunch deal, and was one of the places we took everyone to when they came to visit).

We go past this corner on the bus every morning, and it's been being done up for months. I took against it at first, because they had a sign in the window proclaiming "This is IT-ALY! Taste of Italy coming soon!"
Fairly innocuous, you might think, but that meant that every morning, as I arrived at work, I was humming Danni Minogue's 1993 pop hit "This Is It". And that's a horrible thing to do to someone, especially at that time in the morning.
But then we walked past it on the way to the cinema a couple of weeks ago, and had a glance at the menu. Which looked good, and very reasonably priced.

So we went there. And boy, I hope they make a success of this place!
I had spaghetti fagolini e pesto - potatoes and green beans sauteed with basil pesto (and spaghetti, obviously). It was fantastic. The slight sweetness of the potatoes mingled with the slight saltiness of the pesto. The spaghetti was just al dente. The pesto was oily, as pesto should be, but not overwhelmingly so. Nom nom nom. That's a recipe I'm going to have to recreate at home.

Matt had the quatro formaggi pizza. But this one, oh, it was so much better than the standard four cheese option. Along with mozzarella, gorgonzola, and emmental, it included goat's cheese. It was possibly the most delicious pizza I've ever tasted. (Yes, we shared our lunches.) I thoughtfully said at one point "Y'know, I think I would give up my hypothetical firstborn for this."

It most certainly isn't a place for people on a diet, and I was somewhat thrown by the fact that they charged £2 for a can - let me repeat that, a can - of lemonade, but it was awesome nonetheless.

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3 Comments:

At 11:04 am, Blogger Nettie said...

It does sound really good, I hope we get to go there when we're over :)
Oh, and with the exchange rate as it is...that would be about $4 a can...that's kind of standard here in restaraunts I guess, usually it's that for a glass which is 250ml. But then again if I remember correctly your cans are smaller than ours...ours are 375ml.
Oh well, as long as you had a great time :)

 
At 5:42 pm, Blogger Shawna said...

Sounds like a great place! Hope they can stay in business. Oh, and Dave and I share lunches (at least tastes) all the time--nothing weird about that! ;-)

 
At 6:34 am, Anonymous Jesson said...

sounds really good, and nice place to hang with my friends!!!

 

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