Italian you say.......

Ok, so there is a new relocated Italian restaurant on the south side of the plaza. It's called LaTrattoria. It's actually on Ponce de Leon street which is one of the four streets that frame our big plaza, called Quiroga.

A couple of weeks  ago we decided to have our mid day meal there. We figured we would give it a try, since the only real Italian place that was in town relocated to Morelia and the other quasi in name only place we won't return to because of our last lunch experience.

At LaTrattoria, their menu has the standards, with some local fish dishes and the mandatory Sopa Tarasca which is about as un-Italian as one can imagine.

We were not too ravenous for any meat dishes so we figured we would both have a pasta dish. After all, it would take something quite egregious to be able to screw up a pasta dish.
Boy, were we wrong.

I ordered the spaghetti with a Bolognese sauce which is simply a tomato base with some hamburger or if you have it Italian sausage in the sauce.  So, it was destined to be hamburger of course.
My wife ordered the spaghetti something. The description said that it had some chili de arbol in it.

Now if you remember my wife is a Latina so she is use to pica-pica food.

After about 30 minutes both our plates arrived. As the waiter presented the plates we could tell that this was not going to meet any expectations.

Both our dishes had overcooked pasta, which I would bet was simply rewarmed from a few days before once an order had been garnered.
The sauce coating on the pasta was pasty and gloppy to the point that if you turned the plate on it's side the pasta was stay 100% in the dish. If you need a description of how my pasta dish was, think about the last time you cooked spaghetti, put it away in the fridge for a few days, then rewarmed it, put the remainder in the fridge again, took it out a day or two later and then zapped it in the microwave. It has a particular look to it, gloppy sauce not running or smoothly coated fresh pasta was not to be found.

My sauce was pretty bland, but I was able to find a few specks of meat, sans any seasoning.

After two or three fork fulls that my wife tasted, she tasted mine. At which point she said that both of the dishes were basically inedible. Mine for being devoid of any seasoning and hers from way too much chili de arbol in the sauce.

I doubted her description to which I grabbed a fork full and promptly chomped it down. My action now required finding something to  eliminate the residual burn on my lips to at least 4 to 5 minutes, which was nowhere to be found.  Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy spicy food, but having that level of heat in an Italian dish is totally wrong. They should have called the dish chili de arbol with spaghetti.

All in all, if someone can't make a simple pasta dish without overcooking the pasta, they shouldn't call their joint a Trattoria....period.  Making pasta is one of the simplest ways to make a great dinner without working in the kitchen for hours. All it takes is decent pasta, cooked aldente, good to excellent olive oil, and either basil, garlic, tomatoes and a host of other items which you can put in to your liking and you have a great pasta dish.

Needless to say we have now eliminated the only two supposed Italian places in town, so now I know I just need to buy some more olive oil at Costco, which happens to have one of the highest rated Extra Virgin imported into the North American continent.  

We may give this place a try again in the future, knowing that Italian is not their specialty.
But I kind of doubt it...