Jimmy Daddona’s

I went to Jim­my Dad­don­a’s for din­ner some­what dri­ven by this review in the Free Times. It was­n’t very good at all. Now, I’ve gained a lit­tle knowl­edge at the ways of food­ie-ness just by hav­ing prox­im­i­ty to Five Dol­lar Beer, so I am using some of his cri­te­ria in this review [or, what I think he cri­te­ria are].

We were seat­ed prompt­ly, the food came quite quick­ly the wait staff was fine. The only pos­si­ble com­plaint I can think of is that, per­haps the food came too quick­ly, not giv­ing enough time between cours­es for much con­ver­sa­tion.

The iced tea, like every restau­rant I’ve ever been to, was­n’t strong enough. This I think, is main­ly do to my upbring­ing where iced tea bet­ter be damn well hard to see through. The sal­ad was obvi­ous­ly out of a bag and was just let­tuce, red onion and those car­rot shav­ing things. The house dress­ing, an Ital­ian Vinai­grette, was also rather bland. I don’t like bland sal­ads. We got free gar­lic bread that was tasty enough, but tasty like gar­lic bread is tasty any­where. The only real dif­fer­ence I could dis­cern was that it was approx­i­mate­ly twice as greasy as gar­lic bread any­where.

For my main course I ordered Veal Aglio E Olio which con­sist­ed of veal [they brought the ani­mal out in a cage the size of an over­large rab­bit hutch, appar­ent­ly this is a genet­i­cal­ly bred veal calf, rel­a­tive­ly unrec­og­niz­able as a bovine at all; it had no legs, no tail, not much of a head and looked most­ly like a side of beef with a mouth at one end and an ass at the oth­er. it looked at me out of its moist ves­ti­gial eyes and I could imme­di­ate­ly tell it want­ed me to eat it. but, i kid.] arti­choke hearts, red pep­per, mush­rooms and spinach mixed in with fet­tucine. The por­tion was enor­mous. Think three pounds of food, at least. And it was pos­i­tive­ly swim­ming in olive oil and spices. It was way over­spiced. I could bare­ly taste the arti­choke hearts and that is a seri­ous prob­lem. I ate until I was­n’t hun­gry any more, not until I was stuffed, but I think Jim­my Dad­don­a’s is the type of place where you are sup­posed to look like Mr. Cre­osote from Mon­ty Python’s Mean­ing of Life after­ward.

It tore up my stom­ach. Gur­gle Gur­gle Gur­gle. I could­n’t get to sleep for all the effort that my diges­tive sys­tem was going through pro­cess­ing all that oil and gar­lic. When I woke up this morn­ing, my stom­ach still hurt. In fact, it is still gur­gling now, twelve hours after the meal. Restau­rant food is not sup­posed to attempt a coup d’e­tat from the inside out. So, I did­n’t like it. And now I’ve got 2.5 pounds of Veal Algio E Olio left over.