There were highs and lows. Unfortunately, the lows were just too low to let slide.
We went last night, 4 of us. Our waitress was young and fairly inexperienced, but made up for it with a healthy dose of friendliness and a very genuine effort to give us good service.
Apps:
5-cheese garlic bread. This was definitely one of the high points. Bread was nice and crisp, was covered nicely with cheese, and was served with some really delicious, and fresh-tasting marinara.
Eggplant fries. Novel idea, almost like eggplant parm in a frie form. It was breaded lightly, served with parmesan and marinara for dipping. They were good. They were a tasty, well-executed gimmick to make us think we were eating healthy. The portion seemed like 2 whole eggplants worth. Waitress should have warned us about the portion but somehow thought we knew what we were doing.
Caprese salad: This was mediocre. Instead of fresh basil, it was served with pesto. Not a terrible idea, but it kinda defeats the purpose of caprese, which is meant to be fresh and rustic. The pesto made the caprese neither.
Then the salads came out. These were ridiculous. They were cumbersome, busy, and still uninteresting and lacking flavor. I found two hefty chunks of the inner part of a head of iceburg. Given that the salad already had romain and plenty of other vegetables to begin with--grape tomatoes, cucumbers, black olives, carrots, and red cabbage, why was there any iceburg in there at all? It was also under-dressed. I stopped eating it halfway through.
My entree was a plate of linguine al pomodoro with meatballs. Yeah, fancy-sounding spaghetti and meatballs, which I know isn't the most inspired choice, but it's what I was in the mood for. At the same time, you'd think it would be hard to mess up, but they managed it.
Though the pomodoro sauce had great flavor, it wasn't nearly reduced enough, meaning that my linguine was swimming in this literally watered-down tomato sauce. This is a problem for a few reasons.
One, the flavors in the sauce are less concentrated, which means less flavor to begin with. Two, excess water washes away all the starch on the pasta, leaving nothing for the sauce to stick to, which means even less flavor still. Three, it means that I went home with a shirt that was stained with the splashes of the watery sauce.
I thought maybe the meatballs could redeem it. Not even close. I consistently find better meatballs in a meatball sub from a fast-food sandwich shop. JG's were as dry as I could imagine ground meat could be, having a texture that was distinctly remniscient of a can of purina. I had our waitress take them off the bill.
Thanks to the long wait times (I usually avoid peak hours at restaurants, but we were invited out), we decided to skip dessert.
All in all, two good and one mediocre appetizers, a terrible throw-away salad, and a not-so-great entree. Decent meatballs and just leaving out the salad would probably have been enough for another star, but they were sub-mediocre. Though, flavor-wise, to be fair, Joey Garlic's does some good things, their kitchen just couldn't do the food justice. read more