Eat In Atlanta Blog

Roaches!

Ok, just keep reading. I promise it’s a worthwhile review and a worthwhile restaurant. Even though we had an eventful evening at the cool Highlands spot, most of us had a pretty good meal. We had reservations as the younger brother was in town from school visiting. It was eight of us on a Thursday night and by calling ahead a week in advance, you can imagine, it wasn’t a problem getting seated. First off, their wine list is pretty darn good, and since I have been on a wine kick lately I went for a couple great glasses. I had a merlot/cabernet mix that was AWESOME. Really enjoyed it.

The décor of the place is simple, brick walls nice bar area, and a pretty small quaint restaurant. Good for dates and couples, but not really too much room for many more groups than the one that we had. Service people were nice, but that was too be expected with the friends that we encountered. =)

The menu is different. Lots of appetizers and enough pasta selections (which can be ordered as appetizers or entrees), but very few main entrée selections, with a couple seafoods and one entrée with each type of main meat. Made the selection process easy, but I like a little bit more variety and choices with my dinner. We started with plenty of appetizers. We got the grilled calamari, brushetta and salads around. I ordered the Caesar salad which was better than average and picked on the calamari and bruschetta. We had heard good things about the grilled calamari, but were not too impressed. It was a little too fishy for my liking and lacked a lot of flavor; however, we would certainly re-order the bruschetta and Caesar salad.

It was about this time that we all caught a glimpse of our first (and to find out later, only) little friend was crawling up the brick wall of the restaurant. Matthew (younger brother) proceeded to take his shoe and take care of that roach. We moved on to the main course.

I ordered the pork saltimbocca. It was DELICIOUS. The meat was so tender and wrapped in the prosciutto with the cheese on top made this an awesome choice. I ordered some pasta on the side to go with it and I enjoyed every bite of this dish. Jenny’s meal, however, was not so exciting. She got the swordfish again, and it was dry and totally uneventful. Not that it was terrible, but you would expect more from an entrée when the menu only has seven of them. Everyone else at the table seemed happy with their dishes, but you never know with the Reiners, they don’t often have grand opinions that they make known.

Then the mysterious companion showed up again. As Momma Reiner motioned to the wall, trying to silently let everyone at the table know that the roach was back without letting Jenny know, we all saw the roach was baaaaaack. As Mom was not too secretive with her newly spotted intruder, Jenny stood and awaited Matthew to really kill the fella this time. See, the first time, Matthew missed (the high school baseball player that he is) the roach and pretended it was gone so that everyone could go on enjoying their meals. Fooled us…..

Anyway, this was the last straw, and the manager proceeded to treat the table with a sampling of all the desserts and a free meal for Jenny. The desserts were fine, but the only one we would definitely recommend would be the bread pudding. It was delicious.

Overall, a mixed opinion with some good dishes and some not so good. Despite the infestation problem and the solid apology by the manager, we had an OK time at La Tavola. A good spot in a prime location at Virginia and Highland, but not worth dropping your bug spray to rush to.

Here’s La Tavola’s real website