Rosie’s Italian Grille – Toledo, OH

Rosie’s Italian Grille located just south of Dorr Street on McCord Road has been one of my more favorite Italian places for the last few years. The setting was always intimate, with great food; an excellent person to take a date who wants Olive Garden.

My recent visit though was somewhat of a disappointment though. Firstly, the atmosphere. As it being late fall, the patio is enclosed, with a helluva overabundance of space heaters out there. It was so incredibly hot, I was forced to take my pants off. Secondly, one of the great things Rosie’s did was fresh bread with an infused olive oil. It was placed on your table with the water. Well they don’t do it anyways. Fuck.

Let’s talk food. Not being rather hungry, I took this opportunity to try a pizza. Nothing is more Italian than pizza Margherita. Fully expecting a delicious medium crust, with fresh tomato sauce, slices of mozzarella, and fresh basil, here’s what I got:

You may notice the irregular shape of the pie. That’s good! If you’ve ever tried to hand roll any dough into a circle, you’d know that it’s impossible. Absolutely impossible. I’ve seen some good attempts, but this shows me that it’s hand tossed.

The cheese. While the cheese was fresh mozzarella, I was expecting a more traditional sliced cheese rather than the shredded stuff I got. Speaking of the za being slightly non-traditional, I was also expecting full basil leaves. Instead I get a chiffonade.

As far as the crust itself. While it was good, it was limp and extremely thin. I would have rather had a little more thickness, OR some crispiness. All in all, it’s good, but not great.

As far as the rest of the dinner. The crab cakes were decent, although the horseradish mustard sauce was excellent.

The salad was limp and over dressed, and the risotto was simply mushy rice; it had no creaminess.

All in all, I was quite disappointed and it will take a really good next visit to get me turned back around on this. More to the point, they had a really nice, elegant website, which they’ve recently turned into this mid-90s esque bullshit Flash driven web vomit.

Poor taste…for shame.

C-