Piccola Venezia

Lobster razzioli good, not amazing. Could skip this place.

Very basic Italian food on the North Side of Boston. Cash only, but reasonable enough not to break one’s wallet.
Have eaten here twice, second time by default. Not a bad option, but not as strong as the newer restaurants in the area.

Note to Self: When you’re walking around looking for a place to eat on a Friday night and every restaurant has lots of people waiting on long lines to get a table… and then you find a place that can seat you right away… That is NOT the place you want to eat at!
The service here was so-​so and the portions were pretty big, but the prices were VERY HIGH and the food was not at all good. The bread tasted like it came straight out of a bag. The antipasto salad was little more than a green salad with a few slices of salami and mortadella, three tiny pieces of cheese, and two olives tossed on top. The arancini (rice balls filled with ground beef, peas, and cheese) were over fried and rather tasteless. And, they were served with some sort of cold sauce that tasted like little more than mayonnaise with paprika stirred in. Weird! The chicken cutlet for the chicken Parmesan was adequate, but the spaghetti accompanying it was overcooked to the point of being the consistency of spaghetti-o’s, and the sauce less flavorful and less full-​bodied than Ragu.
So, in the future hungry, hungry self: do yourself a favor and grab an apple to keep yourself from fainting in the middle of the street if you must. And join a long line of people waiting for a decent meal. It will definitely be worth the wait!

I went to this restaurant to explore more Italian dishes that the North End could offer. My dad and I came one night for a Sunday night dinner. The restaurant was not busy when we came.
My dad got an Escarole Soup and Spaghetti with Sweet Italian Sausage doused in a Marinara sauce. I got the Calamari, served over Linguine and doused in a Scampi sauce.
I got a glass of red wine, which is a ²⁰⁰⁶⁄₀₇ Estancia Zinfandel. I thought it was a tiny bit sour, but was a good drink to wash down the bread and the food. I’m not a wine expert, but I thought it was a decent wine.
The bread was okay, nothing too special, just chewy and a little rough around the edges. I was not able to sample the Escarole soup because it was served in such a small bowl.
The calamari came, and it was really tasty. It was not rough to chew, and they were really generous to give me a huge portion. The pasta was also tasty, and the scampi sauce made it tastier. I scrubbed some bread on the leftover scampi sauce and it also made the boring bread much more interesting and tastier to eat.
The Sweet Italian Sausage was the biggest disappointment in the restaurant. I ate a couple of small pieces. The first piece tasted okay, it was a little flavorful. The second piece was awful. It was hard, and very rough to chew. It seems that they cooked some bad sausage in the kitchen. It even tasted funny. My dad also agreed. The spaghetti and the marinara sauce was okay, but the sausage tasted really bad. The sauce made no difference in making the sausage tastier. It kind of baffled me that they would do a good job on a somewhat complex dish (the calamari) but not on a simple dish (the Italian sausage).
Service was okay, it did take a little while for the food to come in. Atmosphere was decent. Before we left the restaurant, the waiter asked:
«What did you think?»
Me (from what I can recall): «The calamari was pretty good but the Italian sausage was not good. It tasted hard and awful. You have to prepare the sausage better. That’s the major improvement. Keep that in mind,»
Waiter: «Will do. Thank you.»
Overall, this was an okay restaurant. This is not one of my top choices to get a good Italian meal at the North End (unless you want some decent calamari and pasta), particularly because of how they prepared the Italian sausage. Hopefully, they can improve on this.