Gusto!

So exactly one week after I could not stop singing the praises of dining in Fountain Square, I return to this space having taken that road again - though this time with a far less pleasant result to report. Now, some of it probably had to do with the fact that Jackson was being a screamy little turd pretty much all day (with the heaviest concentrations of turdishness coming at lunch), but being served a plate on which part of my lunch had clearly been burned (and here we’re talking “carbon scoring,” as in the scene from A New Hope where Luke is cleaning the droids, right before R2 projects the message from Leia) didn’t help. The place in question is Gusto!, in the Murphy building on Virginia Avenue.

First words out of our server’s mouth: “We just ran out of Pepsi.” Amy asks for iced tea. “We have raspberry iced tea.” That would be the sweetened Lipton kind from the fountain. Amy asks if they have just plain old regular iced tea. “Sorry...” I ask for water. “Bottled water?” Hrm. “I’ll have a Mountain Dew?” And yes, I did include an upward voice inflection at the end so that it sounded like a question. The server actually breathed a sigh and sounded relieved that she did not have to apologize again.

First thing you see when you walk in is the bar, and the chalkboards above it tout the many different kinds of beer they have, including a board for “craft” beer, which shows that they know how to appeal to the flip-flop wearing visor-hatted twits who hang out at Chumley’s on weekday afternoons. Next, you walk yourself down the long, narrow dining room that basically consists of tables and an aisle. The stripped wood floors were designed that way, to make it look old, and the paintings - unmounted canvases hanging flat - on the wall are expensive. You sort of get the feeling that if you spent enough time watching from a table in the back that you might eventually see Michael Corleone walk in and whack Sollozzo and the dirty cop.



I’d give you the link to their menu, but the website doesn’t have one! It’s all basic, though - salads, breadsticks and cheesesticks (although they use the letter Y to spell breadsticks and cheesesticks - it would be an improvement if they were kitschy enough to paste little pictures of Dennis DeYoung or Tommy Shaw next to those menu items, but I won’t hold my breath), standard appetizers, spaghetti, and pizza.

I had spaghetti and meatballs, mostly because nothing on the menu sounded interesting other than the meatballs. It turned out, however, to be baked spaghetti, and when it was put down in front of me, I died a little inside. You don’t bake spaghetti. Ever. Even Olive Garden has sense enough not to do that. The meatballs were good, though - very meaty and flavorful, if slightly small. The website describes their tomato sauce as “zesty,” though what they really mean is salty and spicy and heavily herbed. That could have been a consequencce of the baking, however - which removes water and concentrates the flavor of a sauce, and in this case turned what might have been an interesting combination of flavors into a dense, confused mishmash.



Amy’s baked ziti was covered by so much cheese that if Paul Sheldon had rolled his car in it, Annie Wilkes would never have found him. Hers did not have any carbon scoring, however, and the cheese on top was nicely melted, so that it had just started to bubble and brown. Both dishes came with two of their breadsticks, which are rolled from the same dough as their pizza dough and come out flat (like the pizza crust they brag about on the menu) and topped with some herbs and grated cheese. Both crunchy and chewy, they were not bad, but nothing to write home about.

Finally, to the real question - would I go back? The answer there is probably not. I’ll try a new place pretty much at the drop of a hat, but once I’ve tried a place for the first time, it loses that virginal advanatge over places that I know to be better. In this case, one needs only to traverse Virginia Avenue back over the interstate and then turn north on College and follow that for about three blocks to get to Iaria’s, which is both authentic and unpretentious. Gusto! is neither. I could probably be convinced to go back and try the pizza - but it would be a hard sell.