Mambo Italiano

Don’t keel over now, yes I am posting about a Brooklyn restaurant.  Chosen by the NYC Grand Matriarch of the Soprano family, I mean, the boyfriend’s family, aka his mother (GJ), for her recent birthday dinner, (is that enough commas in one sentence?  Well, here’s one more, haha) I found myself jumping on the R train after work and enduring what should have been 30 minutes but was really an hour to get to Mambo Italiano.

I honestly had no idea what to expect… GJ and I don’t really have the same taste in food, to be honest.  Well, actually, BF’s entire family has different taste in food from me; my tastes run the entire gamut, while many members of his family refuse to even look at seafood (so unfortunate!).  But it’s Italian food, and I love Italian food, so…

We started off with two orders of baked clams (10 clams each order; pictured is one order), for the part of the family that does eat seafood plus my boyfriend (who says he doesn’t eat seafood, but is obviously lying).  When this plate was approaching the table, I gagged and whispered to the boyfriend, “Oh my god, what is that AWFUL smell?!” and was aghast to find it was our plate of baked clams.  BF looked at me as though I were crazy; he said he didn’t smell anything, and no one seemed the wiser.  Despite that, since everyone else dug in, I snagged one to try, which was remarkably fishy tasting.  However, it wasn’t as bad as it had smelled a few minutes prior, and when BF and his brother both said they were delicious, I shrugged and tried another one, which was even less fishy tasting than the first.  My third (and final) clam wasn’t fishy at all, and I have to wonder if I was just hallucinating for the first few minutes???  (I didn’t get sick later, either.)  BF and his brother both enjoyed them – his brother most of all, scarfing down 6 clams in quick succession.

We had opted to order everything family style, so everyone would get to try a little bit of everything.  This worked wonderfully in terms of variety; in terms of photographs, not so much, as the staff at Mambo Italiano serves you practically everything.  I did manage to take this snap of our veal parmesan quickly before they cut into it, though.  I found this dish only alright, though BF inhaled it and really enjoyed it.  It was a bit overdone, in my opinion.

GJ and SIL wanted shrimp scampi, so I snagged this shot.  I only tried a bite of the rice, which was hard and poorly cooked (it so temptingly looked like paella…), crunchy in a bad way.  The veggies were soggily cooked, but were about as much as I expected coming from a restaurant as this.  I never have high hopes for veggies that are just lumped onto the plate at what can only be described as a more American-palate-geared restaurant.  Why does American cuisine mean cooking vegetables until all the yumminess has died?  I don’t know.  (There are a good deal of American or New American restaurants that do not abide by this rule, and I admit that readily, but the vast majority of America continues to patronize restaurants that kill veggies so badly that it’s no wonder the average American kid refuses to eat them.) 

One annoying thing to note here: the menu was split into sections as Pasta, Chicken, Veal, Seafood, etc. with prices listed for “entree” and “family”.  We ordered everything family style.  None of us expected any of the dishes to come with their own pasta, rice, or mashed potatoes, nor were we informed of this when we ordered a pasta dish to boot.  I’d have preferred to be apprised of this, because as it were, we had an extra bowl of pasta on the table, and mashed potatoes that no one really wanted.  If you have an a la carte menu, then serve your items a la carte.  If you have “stuff that comes with each dish” please indicate it on the menu.  Thanks.

Since I didn’t manage to get a shot of the penne alla volka [sic] dish before they served us, I took a shot of my portion.  Mushrooms made an appearance here; not your standard vodka sauce addition, but not unwelcome on my plate.  Unwelcome on PopPop’s plate, who hates mushrooms.  The overall feeling towards the pasta wasn’t negative, though I note that the sauce was distinctly lacking in flavor.  It was creamy and rich, but no depth to its one note of tomato+heavy cream taste.  A slice of bacon or prosciutto in the background before cooking would do the sauce well. 

Yet another dish that was dug into before I could take a photo, sorry! but this was the chicken francaise.  Despite it being large hunks of chicken breast – one of my least favorite meats – this was actually quite good.  Saucy enough, with enough lemon to tang my tongue but not pucker my face, and still juicy inside, I was pleasantly surprised to find how good it was.  This dish was hastily devoured by all… although there was considerably less chicken on this plate than there was veal on the veal platter (surprising, considering veal’s reputation for being more expensive).  Oh, maybe it was the huge mound of mashed potatoes that no one wanted to eat taking up all the space on the platter.  Who eats mashed potatoes at a pasta place? 

My entire plate. 

The service was pretty attentive – we’d ordered a carafe of soda, and they made sure my glass, on the other end from where the carafe resided, never went empty.  They were polite and attempted to be as unintrusive as possible, although towards the end of our meal, they were rushing the hell out of us, asking us if we were finished with the penne when there was still a good sized portion left on the plate, and then trying to take away our other platters.  Also, though this could be viewed as my being overly picky, as a person who detests wasting food, I did ask to wrap the leftover rice and veggies from the shrimp, the mashed potatoes and veggies from the chicken, and the pasta plus one piece of veal from that platter.  I received a bag, and assumed everything was inside – assumed that there were only two boxes because they’d plopped the veggies/mashed potatoes/rice into one container, and the pasta & veal in another – and proved, once again, that assuming only makes an ASS out of U and ME.  The veal and pasta were nowhere to be found later, something that made me a bit sad… 

The place was also very small and a bit cramped; a party was going on in one room and we were in the small area directly beyond the hostess station and bar.  Occasionally a woman sitting at the table next to us (not eating; she obviously worked there in some capacity) would get up, stand in this tiny area right next to our table, pick up a microphone, and belt out tunes.  She was a very good singer, but it was loud enough inside that we couldn’t hear each other talk.  And there were only 7 of us, not a terribly large party by any means. 

And though this may have just been the night we picked to go, there was an even larger party next to us – in both the figurative and literal sense of the word – that definitely included, well, some hoo-ahs.  If you don’t know what that means, I’m not going to explain it, because this may not be a family-oriented blog but nor is it one to talk about such unsavory characters.  Suffice it to say, the parade back and forth past our table of scantily clad women (tights and leggings are NOT interchangeable, dear) made me extremely uncomfortable.  Maybe if they’d been hot, I’d have felt slightly less horrified, but I don’t know.  They weren’t. 

The dessert “menu”.  Some tasty looking offerings, but we declined as we had cake waiting for us at home.

Yvo says: Overall, a very mediocre experience not worth a return trip.  It’s out of the way (for me).  The location was only alright for me this time – despite the crappy train ride in – because PopPop and BF’s brother had both driven, so I hitched a ride with them back to the house for cake.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to go (worked late).  The food was extremely blah in the end, the place was super cramped, and the price really wasn’t anything wonderfully cheap, either.  Dinner for 7 with lots of soda, some wine, came out to $270 after a generous tip and tax.  I sincerely do not see a reason for me to ever return.
not recommended