This week, we went to Bazil (located on Empire Boulevard).
Bazil styles itself as a place for casual Italian fare. In other words, it's going for the Olive Garden crowd. You know, people who confuse an overabundance of salt and cream with superb dining. (The same people who call Applebee's their "local" bar and grill.)
So going into Bazil, I was prepared for the worst.
Our waitress gave us our menus and a few minutes to look them over.
The menu was relatively simple. It was one page with all the meals on the front. It was divided into appetizers, salads, pasta and sea meat options. I really like when restaurants do this because, to me, it shows that they are allowed to concentrate on fewer dishes, thus making them better. Olive Garden, on the other hand, has a large menu and it scares me because what if I order the dish that no one else has ordered in a long time? How deep into the freezer/refrigerator must they wade to find my ingredients? Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised.
We ordered the Sicilian calamari appetizer (flash fried calamari with pepperoncini peppers and marinara sauce) and I ordered their vodka pasta (rigatoni with vodka sauce, shrooms and chicken). My wife created her own pasta dish (basically spaghetti and meatballs).
In no time, the waitress brought our family-style bowl of salad. I silently dreaded the way this was going down. This is Olive Garden's schtick. While I was mixing the ingredients and dressing, we were presented with breadsticks. A little more dread creeped in.
We munched our salads down and I can't say anything bad. It was salad with Italian dressing. It's hard to mess up. Could I quibble about how tangy the Italian dressing was? Sure. It wasn't that big a deal, though.
Very shortly after we received our salad and breadsticks, our calamari appetizer arrived. This was, by far, the highlight of the meal. The calamari was delicious. I have no idea if it was authentic or Sicilian or whatever.. it was good, crispy and complemented well by the marinara sauce on the side.
Our meals arrived and, by this time, we were both kind of full from the calamari appetizer. My pasta dish was good. And that's it, really. I liked their take on the vodka sauce. It was very creamy and not too salty. It complimented the chicken, mushrooms and pasta very nicely.
All in all, our meal was very good. I didn't hate myself when I was done and my insides didn't feel like they were being cured from within by all the salt. In other words, it's kind of like this blog post. It did it's job but isn't going to win any awards.
Would this be a place I went again? Maybe, but only if someone else insisted. I, personally, wouldn't go out of my way for a return visit. Don't get me wrong, the food was tasty and the service was adequate. If I'm ever in a dining party that suggests Olive Garden, I will push hard to get us to Bazil, instead. In the end, I think that would make Bazil's day.
