- Image by SonnyandSandy via Flickr
Over the past week we had dinners from both of Taste of Sicily and Oggi’s Pizza and Brewing Company, both in Orange. Unfortunately neither wowed us. Let’s start with Taste of Sicily. (sorry for no pictures)
We order takeout from Taste of Sicily over the weekend. I ordered the 1/2 and 1/2 which is a half order of Lasagna and a half order of spaghetti, along with an order of sausage. Mrs. DanGarion ordered the cheese tortellini. All dinners come with soup or salad and garlic knots. First let’s start from the beginning. The salad was huge, each salad we received would have been enough for at least two people. I wasn’t really fond of the creamy Italian dressing and would probably pick something else next time, I tend to be a fan of Caesar or thousand island dressings and it just didn’t cut it to me. Both Mrs. DanGarion and I loved the garlic knots, they were definitely the star of the show, and not only were they great but they gave us more than enough for two people. Moving onto Mrs. DanGarion’s entree, the Cheese Tortellini ($13.95) was described as “fresh pasta tortellini stuffed with sharp cheddar” and it was to be served with a cream sauce. The Mrs. ordered it with marinara instead because she doesn’t like cream sauce, the marinara was sweet with very little flavor other than tomato, which was disappointing. The tortellini lacked shard cheddar cheese flavor and when cut one in half to see what was inside it appeared more like they were stuffed with gnocchi instead of cheese. She won’t be ordering this dish in the future. My 1/2 Lasagna and 1/2 Spaghetti (small $12.95 large $14.95) order looked promising and when I had my first bite of the lasagna it even tasted promising. The lasagna was great, the pasta was perfect and the sauce had lots of flavor, the same flavor I was hoping for with my spaghetti. Unfortunately the spaghetti had the same lifeless “Ragu” style sauce of the tortellini. I hoped the sausage I ordered would save the day and when I noticed it was in a much more flavorful meat sauce I thought I found a winner till I took a bite of the mushy average tasting sausage. The taste was fine, but the mouth feel of the sausage just didn’t hold up, it was too finely ground.
so overall it was a very lacking meal with some highlights but the low points won out in the end.
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Garlic Knots [xrr rating=4.5/5]
Last night we had dinner at Oggi’s Pizza and Brewery in Orange. This wasn’t our first visit here, but it had been some time since we had pizza and Oggi’s. We first had a Caesar salad (half order $7.95) which was pretty good, the dressing wasn’t too fishy and our waiter even gave us two garlic knots since he knew we were splitting the salad (garlic knots weren’t as good as Taste of Sicily’s). Along with our salad we ordered a medium Oggi’s Special ($18.95) which comes with pizza sauce, pepperoni, Italian sausage, mushrooms, red onions, bell peppers, and fresh chopped tomatoes. In the past we really liked their pizza, but today the pizza really was a foul ball. It was soggy in the middle and the crust just seemed to be some dough the ingredients were sitting on. Although most of the ingredients were quite good the Italian sausage stood out as blah tasting over processed sausage. It’s just not the type of pizza I expect if I’m going to pay nearly 20 bucks for it. I doubt we will be returning to Oggi’s any time soon (which I included on their comment card), even though our waiter was great, the food just doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to be.
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Garlic Knots [xrr rating =3/5]
