Bitter garlic leaves a bad taste at this Italian resto

Share

It sometimes takes only one ingredient to ruin an entire menu. When that ingredient is garlic and the restaurant is Italian, well, you could call it a recipe for disaster.

At the new Trattoria Park Royal, the garlic is so overwhelmingly bitter we could still feel it biting back three hours later. And that was just the cheese sauce on the linguine carbonara. The ubiquitous tomato sauce – used on nearly half the pizzas, pastas and antipasti – left an even worse taste in the mouth.

Trattoria is owned by the Glowbal Restaurant Group, which boasts eight successful restaurants including Glowbal, Coast, Italian Kitchen, Black + Blue and The Fish Shack. This is the second Trattoria and a prototype for a chain that will expand to five or six locations by 2016.

It's been many years since I visited the original Trattoria in Kitsilano, but I distinctly recall enjoying the food. It's the most casual, family friendly, rustic restaurant in the company collection.

Whatever you think of the other Glowbal restaurants, which are often loud and flashy, I think it's fair to say that the food across the board is usually hyperpalatable. Signature spaghetti and meatballs, Brussels sprouts and sugared doughnuts are larded up with so much addictive cream and fat they have become cult classics.

There are worse foundations on which to build an empire. And at first glance, a Trattoria chain appeared, at least to me, like a sure thing.

Located in the Park Royal Mall's new south-side parking lot development, the restaurant certainly looks quite fetching with its high ceilings, butcher-block tables, white marble counters and bright-red standup toolboxes for storing cutlery. There are two patios splashed with red umbrellas, including one on the rooftop.

With its vast customer database, the Glowbal Group has a built-in market of potential diners who probably appreciate not having to cross the bridge and trek downtown for some of their favourite dishes.

But the food at this Trattoria is not of the same quality as that being served at other Glowbal Group restaurants.

Let's start with the mozzarella bar. Trattoria offers a selection of fresh burrata, a soft Italian cheese made from mozzarella and cream – which is here slashed into a loose slapdash smear – on herbed crostini and a variety of toppings. We opted for heirloom tomato marmellata, a chunky jam-like spread. I'm not saying marmellata is necessarily the best use of fresh heirloom tomatoes in their prime at the peak of August, which is when I ordered it. But the name does at least imply that the dish is going to be sweet, which it was – sickly sweet.

Penne pomodoro, on the other hand, does not usually call for a sweet tomato sauce. Although not caramelized like the marmellata, this simple, basic sauce on the pasta platter was astonishing in its complexity – disconcertingly sweet at first, but with a curiously metallic aftertaste.

It was a bitter flavour that I would soon become quite familiar with, turning up as it did in about half the dishes I tried over two visits. It was most prominently featured in linguine carbonara, which shocked me out of my sleepy stupor on a lazy Sunday morning.

The culprit was obviously garlic, so strong it nearly made my eyes water. Maybe it was sprouted with green stems. Could be that it was overcooked or sat out for too long. Whatever happened, this garlic was so sharply acrid and bitter – a flavour profile, it should be noted, that halts the experience of tasting and was used as warning sign for our cave-dwelling ancestors to avoid eating poisonous plants – it could have peeled paint.

That said, I was impressed by the silky texture of the carbonara, a tricky egg-based sauce that is easily scrambled.

The signature spaghetti and meatballs on the pasta platter? Not so much. The truffled cream sauce was curdled and separated into spongy bits that clung to the noodles like thick dandruff.

The gnocchi, also imbued with a bitter whiff of garlic in its tomato cream sauce, was tough and gummy. Roasted chicken in the garganelli pollo was remarkably bland.

A Siciliana pizza, cooked in the fire-burning forno oven, had a chewy rustic crust with blistered edges and golden leopard spotting on the bottom. But the voluptuous toppings – sausage, olives, pepperoncino and rosemary – could not disguise that odd sweet-and-bitter tomato sauce underneath.

Service was generally friendly, although inexperienced. On our first visit, the waitress kept trying to take our order before we had even looked at the menu. She offered us water, then forgot about it. The burrata arrived before our bottle of red wine. The wine was unpleasantly warm.

The service on our next visit was bizarre. We ordered a bruschetta sampler that went wrong before it arrived at the table. A female server – not the fellow who took our order – was headed our way with the plate, then abruptly turned around and went back to the kitchen.

As she was returning, our original server started shouting at her from across the room as he raced to another table. She pointedly ignored him. He shouted again.

"Is that your manager?" I asked.

"No, I'm the manager," she replied through a teeth-grinding smile.

The Glowbal Group might want to make some adjustments before opening three or four more locations.