Bucca di Beppo

I went from never hearing about this restaurant before, to hearing a lot about it recently. So when I got a sweet coupon in the mail earlier in the week for $10 off Rick and I decided to give it a try. They have 3 locations in San Diego, but we decided to go ahead and go with the downtown location. We're not huge into the downtown scene, we tend to prefer quiet evenings at home, but even still it's fun to get all dressed up and go downtown every once in a while.

It was a Saturday night so we were not surprised when we couldn't find any street parking. Luckily there was a parking garage nearby that wasn't ridiculously priced. We put our name on the list (it was a 2 hour wait!!!) and headed to the borders across the street. We couldn't have planned that any better! It was a great way to kill time, plus I had been intending to go to Borders anyway to use some borders bucks I had earned.

So with a half hour of wait time to still spare we made our way back to Bucca di Beppo's to see where we were on the list. Turns out they called our name already, so back on the list we went for another 15 minutes or so. Finally it was time for us to be seated, and we were shown our way to our table which took us through the actual kitchen. There was a booth in the kitchen for people to sit and watch, which I thought was pretty cool.

The atmosphere was loud, probably more so than normal as there was a huge party right by our table. They left shortly after we got there though, and the noise was then very bareable. We decided on an appetizer of Fried Calamari, and then we shared the baked rigatoni. The calamari was good, but nothing out of this world. I did really like the marinara sauce served with it, because it had a nice healthy dose of red pepper flakes. The baked rigatoni was very tasty in my opinion. It honestly reminded me of lasagna. The serving (small) was huge and we have plenty left over for tonights dinner.

While the food was good overall, I'm not sure it was at all worth the wait. I probably would have been very disapointed had we not had our coupon. But for me that is one of the hardest things about eating at Italian restauraunts... nothing on the menu ever stands out as spectacular, and it's one of the cheapest types of food to cook at home.

However our downtown dinning experience cost us little more than a fast food dinner (not including tip, and parking of course) so I really can't complain too much. I'm glad we tried it, but I'll probably just stick to Olive Garden.