Address: 9400 S State St, Sandy, UT 84070. 801.304.4075.
Review: Here's a sure fire why to tell a self-professed Italian restaurant won't produce good Italian food: it's name contains a misspelling. Amazingly, you would think someone would misspell "spaghetti" what with its seven letters and all. But no, somehow someone misspelled "mamma," creating the distinctively non-Italian "mama." Now, one could argue "mama" is an American word and signifies Italian-American food, but in this case even that's a stretch. Spaghetti Mama's does in fact make Italian-American food, but not very well.
The first thing we notice about this restaurant was the austerity of the menu. For dinner (dinner mind you) there were only about seven main entrée choices.
We started our meal with the house salad. Normal house salad everyone's had a thousand times. Next was the calamari. It came lightly breaded (good) and tender (good). It also came doused (bad) in a spicy sauce (meh) which removed all crunchiness from the breading (bad), and inexplicably topped with chopped tomatoes (worthless and tasteless). Then came the chicken parmesan served over spaghetti. Like so many American Italian restaurants, the tomato sauce was not incorporated with the spaghetti, creating a mound of partially dry, partially hydrated pasta. This technical faux paus aside, the sauce was watery and had no character. The chicken was breaded and fried and topped with cheese (what you would expect), but lacked any of the crunchy goodness you expect from good fried chicken. Additionally, the cheese lacked good mozzarella flavor. It was bland, lifeless, soulless food.
At one point during our meal, we looked to the booth next to us and noticed a plaque with the following inscription, "Larry and Gail Miller." Not even the presence of this great businessman and philanthropist can save Spaghetti Mama's from itself.
Rating: 3/10 (5/10 is average)
There's a much advertised beauty parlor/spa in the Utah Valley (I believe -- I honestly didn't pay that much attention before hearing the ridiculous name) which titles itself, absurdly, "Sono Bello." Perhaps if Utah Valley were a slightly more liberal locale it might make a little bit of sense, but then maybe first person plural would be more appropriate. As it is, the advertising, last I saw it, featured exclusively women.
ReplyDelete