Buca di Beppo

Hey Joe, ya got any SPICES in this basement?

It's been nearly a year since hubby and I first visited the Buca di Beppo restaurant in Lynnwood, Washington. Long before our friends invited us, though, we'd been interested in going. Radio ads made the place sound like a lot of fun, ideal for large parties and family groups—and with a table set right in the kitchen, the chefs had to be pretty confident about their work, right?

Well...

I really can't fault Buca di Beppo in a few areas: they've got a cheerful, friendly staff, a pleasant clientele, extremely generous portions and atmosphere out the wazoo. The trouble lies with the food itself, which was less than inspiring.

Welcome to Sinatra's nonna's house
Walk into the lobby of Buca di Beppo ("Joe's Basement" to you) and be transported to the quintessential Italian-American restaurant experience, circa 1955. Everything you'd expect is here—the cheesy wall murals and postcards of Italy, the Roman Catholic gewgaws and gimcracks, the miniature plaster saints and statuary, the wine bottles and plastic grapes hanging from the ceiling, about a kajillion black-and-white stills of a young and very dishy Sophia Loren, and Christmas lights threaded through everything. Your server will guide you straight through the kitchen, where the staff (and the folks at the kitchen table) will greet you cheerily, then into one of several different "theme rooms." We were seated in the Wine Room, with the aforementioned plastic grapes hanging from the ceiling (a small child in our group kept asking if they were real and whether she could eat them).

Your server will not bring you a paper menu, since the restaurant doesn't offer one. Instead, everything sold at Buca di Beppo (including pocket protectors and refrigerator magnets) is listed on a menu board in each room. If you're seated at the far side of the room or you wear glasses, you may need to leave your table to give the menu your full scrutiny. Now before you begin wailing at the prices, realize that this place serves everything family style—as in "Papa, Mama and four ravenous teenage boys" family style. Unless you're a sumo wrestler, you can't dine here alone; each menu item is meant to serve between four and eight people. If you're not sure about portions, ask your server. And keep an eye on the next table.

Service
Our server was friendly and chatty. He started us off with water and lemonade, and came by regularly to see if we needed anything. Kitchen service, however, was slow—although our server let us know what was causing the wait, it took a long time for our order to trickle in.

Food
For an appetizer, we ordered the evening special—a focaccia-style garlic bread that arrived hot from the oven, drizzled with olive oil and sliced garlic. It was about the size of a pizza, and we cut it into slices and shared it around. Had everything else been as tasty as this, Buca probably would have scored five stars in this review.

Next came the small mixed green salad. "Small" is a misnomer here, since what we got was a good-sized serving bowl overflowing with lettuce. This was our first disappointment—while the bits of pickled red onion were a nice touch, the salad seemed to have been tossed almost exclusively with olive oil; there was not a hint of vinegar, salt, sugar or herbs in evidence. This wasn't a vinaigrette as much as an olivette. Well, we had ordered a "plain green salad;" perhaps the other items would rise to the occasion.

The chicken marsala arrived—a platterful of nice, meaty pieces of chicken cooked in a brown marsala sauce, with huge fresh mushrooms. I love chicken marsala and have ordered it at many restaurants, and though the sauce at Buca was sweeter than normal, it was very good.

The pasta—a basic order of spaghetti with meat sauce—was a colossal disappointment. With such simple ingredients, it would seem difficult to go wrong—but the pasta had been cooked in unsalted water, and the meat sauce was sweet and skimpy, lacking the robust flavor we expected. Frankly, I could have done a better job in my own kitchen, and I'm not Italian.

We also ordered the evening's special—a veal dish served over garlic mashed potatoes and slices of eggplant, scattered with shrimp and chopped bell peppers. Although the garlic mashed potatoes were delicious, the eggplant was improperly cooked and added a very strange texture to the dish. Further, I'd been hoping for something special when we ordered veal—in recent years it has become a "politically incorrect" meat of sorts, so when I do order it, I expect something more from the extra cost. This dish could have featured nearly any meat—pork or chicken or even lamb—and it would have tasted about the same.

Dessert? I don't think so.
I can't vouch for dessert—we certainly didn't have room left to sample anything, and based on our dining experience I imagine it's anyone's guess how the "dolci" stack up. Perhaps the next time we visit Buca, we'll have more information in that regard.

And we will visit again, just to see if perhaps we came on an off night or made some particularly poor menu choices. When we return, I'll let you know whether my first impression was unjustified—or whether this restaurant's great reputation is truly as insubstantial as the Emperor's new clothes.

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