Tuesday afternoon, 10/19, I went to Santangelo’s Restaurant on Old Liverpool Road for lunch. I learned that, for now, they’re closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and aren’t open until 4PM; cursed Covid and lack of staffing issues!

pasta fagioli

I was craving lasagna, which makes it difficult to eat anything else. So I waited until Wednesday just after 4PM to show up for dinner. It was already half packed, but someone escorted me to a booth pretty quickly.

I decided to start off with pasta fagioli and bread and ordered the lasagna. The problem with pasta fagioli is that every restaurant makes it drastically different, unlike lasagna. With lasagna, the sauce might be different but pretty much everything else tastes the same. With this particular soup, I’ve been to multiple Italian restaurants and Italian-leaning restaurants (so I don’t have to battle with people who say Olive Garden isn’t a real Italian restaurant) and it’s never been made the same way.

In this case, it was overloaded with macaroni that I can’t identify, since I’m not good with all the different types of noodles. It wasn’t quite a soup because there wasn’t a lot of liquid, and there wasn’t enough room for meatballs or any other meat. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t close to what I was expecting.

lasagna

What was great and what I was expecting was the lasagna; wow! You usually get lasagna in two forms; the high tower look or the spread out look. I tend to like it either way as long as there’s plenty of sauce, mozzarella cheese and meat… this had all of that in spades.

It was a sizable portion, which means I brought half of it home. The pasta was cooked properly, not smushy. I enjoyed the sausage, and though it wasn’t listed on the menu I’d swear I tasted a bit of hamburger. The sauce was tasty, the ricotta was properly dosed, and the mozzarella cheese was overwhelming… which I love!

The server was attentive, the lighting proper… for a place I hadn’t been to in close to 10 years, I didn’t remember what it looked like inside, but I think it was the first time I ever sat in a booth. I can’t comment on the ambience because, as usual for me, I was out on my own, so I was watching a movie on my tablet. I can say I was comfortable.

I’ll remember to keep Santangelo’s on my list of dinner places to go to. Next time I’ll probably try some kind of steak, and I might even order dessert… if I don’t already have ice cream and Hershey’s chocolate at home. 🙂