A Rant Against Family Style Dining
First of all, I have no problem if you are sitting around your dining room table and your mother puts down a huge pile of food for dinner and you are told to dig in. Great! I love it! But when I went to a chain Italian restaurant named Buca Di Beppo, and was proudly informed by the waiter that you ate family style here, just like you were in mama’s house in Sicily, I was not happy. Basically, you order a small number of main courses (in our case, 2 main courses for 8 people) and you get a humungous pile of food and everyone digs in. You must be kidding me! You mean I don't get to order what I want? We’re supposed to agree in our family? With four people on special diets, three vegetarians and two with lactose intolerance? No way!

So after quite a long discussion, we were able to pick out one meat dish the non-vegetarians could eat and one non-meat dish that everyone could eat. Mind you, I say “could eat”, because I normally would not order spaghetti with marinara sauce for myself, it’s not one of my favorite dishes, I don’t want pasta on my diet anyway, but I seem to have no choice. For the record, the chicken marsala was wonderful, the spaghetti marinara was below average.

The seating at Buca Di Beppo is a booth, and while I don’t normally get claustrophobic, I felt the booth was kind of cramped and tucked into a cubbyhole in the wall where the table was surrounded by three walls up to the ceiling (unlike booths in other restaurants where the booths only go up to the height of the booth, and then you have maybe one wall or open air above the booth. The service was alternately good and bad. Before they seated us, they insisted on taking us on a tour of the restaurant (just like the tour you would get in mama’s house in Sicily, I presume), not bothering to ask if we were hungry and would we rather order first? For each course, we were brought new plates and the previous course’s plates where whisked away. Great, but could you please bring us eight clean plates instead of seven plates, one of which is dirty? Why did the side dish of meatballs arrive five minutes before the pasta? Why did the cheesecake arrive for dessert, but no plates and forks arrived until later? And one of my biggest pet peeves at any restaurant, don't give us plates straight out of the dishwasher, steaming hot, for a cold dish such as cheesecake.

The restaurant was overdecorated, there was just too much on the walls, it was distracting. The family style dinner theme was abandoned when it came to drinks, instead of giving us a pitcher of stuff, we got to order our own drinks individually. Oh, I see now, that’s where the profits are, let’s give everyone exactly the drink they want and maybe they’ll drink lots — but let’s cut costs on the dinner itself, its obviously cheaper to make a few humongous dishes than everyone’s order individually like in other restaurants. And let’s make sure that we don’t bother cooling those plates for the cheesecake, that takes more time and more plates and why bother? The customers are going to eat the cheesecake regardless!

I won’t be back to Buca di Beppo.