Linguini's Pizza, Alameda, California
We ate at Linguini's last night, and I was disappointed. Linguini's is at the North end of Park Street, Alameda's twee little downtown shopping district, across the street from Ole's Waffle House. It appears to have the potential for good food: usually crowded, two storefronts instead of one (a casual bar/grill place and a fancier restaurant place), plenty of recommendations from locals.
The food was disappointing, though, at least to this New Yorker. We started with the "Famous Garlic Bread." The major difference between this garlic bread and other garlic bread was that this one was literally drowning in parsley. There was Asiago cheese on top, too, rather than Parmesan. Well. Big difference, you know.
Free soda refills, though, and they were prompt about them. Actually, nothing about the service was bad at all.
Then the pizza. We got the "Acropolis," which looked to be standard-fare vegetarian Greek pizza. Unfortunately, it was a lot more boring than that. Imagine, if you will, a simple pesto/red onion pizza. Tip out a Greek salad on top (with black olives, rather than kalamata; this is Alameda we're talking about here, not Palo Alto). Bring it to the table. Ignore the shocked looks of your friends and family as you serve them this item. Just make them eat it by making them feel guilty about how much work you did to make them a Greek pizza.
A pizza really needs to have mixed flavours. You don't want to have something that tastes like it's trying to be two things at once. A pizza that's trying to be a pizza and a salad will do a bad job at being like either one. I could dismiss it as a fluke if we hadn't had the parsley bread. Instead it appears to be a boring cook. So I doubt I'll be returning to Linguini's any time soon.