I ate at Peppino's Ristorante Italiano in Oviedo, FL. One of the first things I noticed upon entering the restaurant was that I seemed to be the youngest one eating by forty years. That didn't last long when about 100 people entered the restaurant for an Oviedo High School Basketball team banquet. From that point on, the restaurant got very loud. Luckily, our order was in before the banquet, so the food didn't take too long.
Salad came first. For the main course, I ordered a tortellini dish served in a pink sauce with ham and mushrooms. I asked for no mushrooms, but I really didn't see any ham on the plate either. Besides from that, it was pretty good. The sauce was definitely homemade and although it wasn't as creamy as most other pink sauces I've come across, it was still very tasty. The sauce was definitely much more interesting that what I've had at other local Italian restaurants. The other person I was eating with did complain that their portion was tiny for what Peppino's charged, but my tortellini was enough.
Once again, I ate at the Sweet Tomatoes in Altamonte Springs, FL. Here's my plate of salad... And here is some tortellini soup that tasted pretty good. I really don't like these salad bar type places too much...
In the shopping center at the intersection of Lockwood and Mitchell Hammock in Oviedo, FL, there is an Italian Restaurant called Cafe Panuzzo's. The neon lights out front attracted me to the restaurant while I was riding by, and I eventually returned to give Cafe Panuzzo's a try.
I ordered Tortellini Alfredo. It came with a salad and bread, both of which were served before the tortellini. It was pretty good bread. The tortellini itself tasted okay, but it was a bit boring. It was basically the pasta and sauce on a plate, and that was it. Adding anything at all to break up the monotony of the pasta would have been an improvement. Sprinkling some basil leaves on top or something would have helped. The food did taste okay, but it was nothing that will have me going out of my way to return to Cafe Panuzzo's any time soon to eat more boring food.
I ate lunch at the T-Rex restaurant in Downtown Disney. The restaurant has been open for just over a week now so it's still very new.
I ate their Triassic Tortellini. It was basically tri-colored tortellini topped with sun dried tomatoes, peas, lots of basil, various cheeses, and alfredo sauce. It would normally come with mushrooms, but I asked for them to be left out. The Triassic Tortellini also came with a hunk of bread which was way too hard. I thought it tasted pretty good overall, but it wasn't worth the $17 that the restaurant charged for the pasta. But then again, it is a restaurant in Disney, and everything on Disney property is overpriced. If they gave you something with the pasta it would have been better though. Include a side salad and the price wouldn't seem as bad. This goes the same for the sandwiches on the menu here too. For a $13 sandwich, they don't even include fries. Fries are cheap, and people would be much happier getting fries than potato chips. Similar to the neighboring Rainforest Cafe, T-Rex was filled with animatronic dinosaurs, sea creatures, and prehistoric mammals. I was actually kind of disappointed with the animatronics. Robotic dinosaurs have been around for years. I would think that a restaurant in Disney would invest in some robots with more realistic and fluid movements. Most of the animatronics here reminded me of construction equipment covered in rubber skin. Here are a few pictures of the animatronics and the rest of the restaurant: The pictures below are of a section of the restaurant called the Ice Cave. Notice the walls are a bluish ice color. Here, the same walls in this Ice Cave have now changed to red. The color change is due to the simulated meteor shower that happens every half hour in the restaurant. That's right, every half hour in a restaurant that is very kid friendly, they simulate the event that killed off most life on earth. Whoever decided to include this in the restaurant is very demented...
Although way overpriced, the food tasted okay. The restaurant with all of it's creatures making lots of noise was cool to see once, but it isn't a place that I'll probably be returning to anytime soon. I've seen it, and there's plenty of other restaurants in the area that I haven't tried yet.
I ordered the Tortellini alla Romana from Dominics II Italian restaurant in Boca Raton, Florida. The tortellini was served in a cream sauce with peas, onions, and bits of prosciutto. It was good, although the sauce did seem a little watered down...
I ate at a Fridays in Boca Raton, Florida today. I ordered and ate Lobster Tortellini for my meal. I'm not a big fan of lobster, but it sounded good and looked even better in the picture on the menu. The tortellini pasta itself was very tasty, filled with cheese and lobster bits. It was the chunks of lobster meat that were mixed in along the pasta that I didn't like as much...
I also had a revelation about ketchup given in restaurants today. While in Fridays, I realized that Heinz ketchup no longer comes in the clear glass bottles in restaurants where the ketchup would always get stuck. Instead, it's now always given in these plastic bottles that are painted ketchup red so it always looks like the bottles are filled... Weird. I just noticed that...
