200 Views of Rome: Pastificio

🌟🌟☆☆☆



2 Stars



Pastificio is a little takeout pasta place in the Spanish Steps area. I just went and looked at Internet pictures to make sure I had the right place. There are a lot of pictures of crowds of people lined up outside. I didn't have that experience and was the lone customer, with my wife, when we arrived. But it was the right place. I went there once and got two kinds of pasta that I remember distinctly as "flavor one" and "flavor two". In looking at the pictures I saw so many exterior shots of Pastificio I started to think "People must like the idea of the place more than any food." Maybe I'm right, maybe not. I did get to the food pictures finally, and that was just as I remembered. Not bad pastas coated in largely featureless sauces of no great flavor or integrity. Go there and you have a few choices of varieties of pasta from behind their glass. Don't worry too much what flavor you pick as they are all pasta flavor. It's cheap, maybe five or six euros a serving, which seems amazing until you realize this just seems to preclude them putting anything good on the pasta. Perhaps it would have been improved by a liberal grating of excellent Parmigiano Reggiano, but I'm pretty sure a boot would be greatly improved with a liberal grating of excellent Parmigiano Reggiano.

I took my two flavors home with me. It probably made them worse so I've tempered my rating. I did taste it at the takeout though and can't say it had come far down from that. The pasta had grown more soupy mostly. There was never much flavor to lose. I wanted to like it. I threw most of it out. 

And so, two stars for the stars in our eyes when we're in lovely Rome, that can cloud our judgement when we review cheap pasta takeouts.