Actual, being Italian and loving white people food, wanted to go to Buca di Beppo today. So we went.
It was... strange. Spectacular at times, crazily bad at others.
Obviously the restaurant consultants have been here and deposited their "improvements".
I'll say first out that as usual we had a phenomenal waitress. If there's anything Buca does right, it's hiring waitstaff. Our waitress was freaking awesome and kept us entertained (and fed) the entire time. The only thing about her that annoyed me (and this is not her fault) is that the scripts they are giving the waitstaff are even more obnoxious than before. Before they changed their scripts, Buca waitstaff were at the high end of obnoxious and classless when it came to pushing addons. They are worse now. During our service, I counted 9 different "Can I start for you/Can I get for you" little innocent pushes for addons. It's not subtle. People spend tons of money at Buca, there's no need for this. Buca, stop forcing your waitstaff to act like they're serving at Friday's. It's a disservice to your restaurant and your waitstaff. You guys hire the most engaging, vivacious, fun people in town, and your sales scripts just piss off your clientele.
And then there's the new olive oil.
If you've been to Buca in the past, you should find this all a bit odd.
What Buca used to do was bring your table a basket of bread. They would take one of their oval plates (or more than one) and fill it with great extra virgin olive oil and delicious balsamic vinegar. You could add salt and pepper to your taste. The evo and balsamic were left on the table so you could make more bread dip if you wanted.
Apparently this was too much for Buca.
The new and improved process begins with one bread slice per customer. So we got a bread basket with two whole pieces of bread. Then came the dish of evo you see in the above picture. Like Guy Fieri's Temple of Vomit, the evo is not left at the table like it used to be at Buca. You have to ask for more, not to mention that there's no balsamic. Oh, and you have to ask for salt and pepper shakers too--they aren't on the table by default anymore. The funny part is that the dish pictured holds more evo than the old dish ever did, which means their cost cutting measure, by volume, is not very successful.
But that really doesn't mean anything until you taste what Buca is now passing off as olive oil.
Extra virgin olive oil, the good stuff, tastes grassy. Grassy is that fresh olive flavor that good evo has. Bitter is the taste that bad evo has. Not just straight up bitter, but metallic bitter. Bitter in the sense that putting vegetable oil in a rusty can would result in a similar flavor provile. When evo goes rancid, or you press the worst, oldest olives, you get straight up metallic bitter tasting evo. It's sounds like a subtle difference, but it isn't. Even the most basic palate can detect the difference between grassy and metallic bitter.
I have personally tasted upwards of 200 varieties of evo, including evo right out of the press. I can tell the difference. Actual, being anosmic, has a better bad evo detection system than I do. Having no sense of smell, Actual has an extremely sensitive palate when it comes to foods like evo.
We both agreed. The new olive oil at Buca is fucking disgusting. It's wretched. That shit should not be served to human beings.
After we told our awesome waitress that the evo was off, she brought us new evo and said that the chef had even tasted it, and said that the flavor profile was intentional. She said it was indeed more "olivy" than most other evo. There's grassy and then there's disgustingly bitter. This was disgustingly bitter. Actual likened it to putting a Brillo pad in her mouth. Buca being a chain restaurant, obviously corporate procurement has decided this evo is "good enough". It is NOT. SHAME ON YOU.
This alone made us doubt whether we even wanted to be eating there. Honestly, if any Italian restaurant served me cringingly bitter evo so bad that I wondered if it had turned, I would walk out. Especially if they told me it was that way on purpose. Super especially, if the head chef agreed.
We stayed, though. And I'm glad we did. The waitress told us that the recipes at Buca had been tuned up to be more bold and flavorful, and that was definitely true.
First up was the antipasto salad. Great as usual.
Next was an order of chicken saltimbocca. In English, this dish translates to "crack-infused meth with opium garnish and heroin extract designed to be as addictive as possible to Actual". This dish is phenomenal. We only wish they brought the veal version back.
And my contribution, a Buca Large order of their spaghetti with meat sauce. The spaghetti was phenomenal as always, but the sauce was a concoction of super megaton flavor. This was definitely better than the meat sauce they had before (which was already good). I could eat this sauce out of a bowl with a giant spoon.
Keep the sauces, lose the olive oil. Please.
