Work friends decided to have our own Christmas dinner/gathering on top on the annual workplace party. G, having been all around town, decided on Marcello on Commercial. As he said, it’s Italian and most people enjoy Italian (except me that is haha).
I’ve never been there before so I read some reviews. It seems that they’re really slow and service is not always the best, so honestly I did not prepare myself to receive the best service or to have the best experience there.
Also, from what I heard from L2, the owner of Marcello (Marcello Lombardo) used to be the owner of Lombardo’s, which is a thin-crust pizzeria just a few stores down. But apparently he had a divorce and had to give Lombardo to his ex-wife, which is why he opened Marcello just down the street, probably as a vengence thing to compete for business haha.
Even though we went on a weekday it was still busy enough. Mind you it wasn’t packed but there was certainly a lot of people. I liked the ambiant lighting.
Service so far was so good. I started with a Long Island Iced Tea ($6.95). It came pretty quickly. It was quite sweet though and I couldn’t really taste the alcohol in it.
On a side note, I did not like how this picture turned out…the subject was blurry while the background was clear!!!
A bunch of them shared the Deep-fried Baby Squid starter ($13). It looked really good. Even though it’s supposed to be deep-fried it did not look that way at all. I sampled a piece and it was not overly battered and quite tender. However I found there wasn’t much flavor to it.
Newcomer Jube (she’s from Edmonton…where they don’t have good food haha!) ordered the Spaghetti Carbonara ($12/$14) and it looked and smelt heavenly. I sampled a bit also and it was full of creamy, yummy goodness. If I really liked pasta I would order it too next time.
But I’m honestly not a big pasta fan, so I ordered their thin-crust pizza instead. L2 recommended the Quattro Stagioni which has 4 sections: Marinara, Funghi, Vegetariana, Salam ($14). It was really, really good. I enjoyed all sections very very much, especially the Funghi quadrant (see how it’s stacked full of mushrooms???). The Marinara side had anchovies which was equally delicious and even the Vegetariana side was flavorful, even without any meat. The Salam turned out to be my least favorite (that’s not to say I didn’t like it, I just like the other ones better), as the salami tasted quite “porky” haha.
Overall good food, good company, good experience. Service was actually good too. We weren’t bothered, but our server was easy to flag down, and she did the separate bills thing quite seamlessly (we had 10 people altogether). I will definitely be back.
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