Eating From the Trash Can: Amante, Chicken Parm, And Seattle’s Existential Despair

Dear reader, you are witnessing what I am pretty sure is the death of all hope that Seattle will ever get Italian food right. For want and lack of a proper cheap Italian experience, I set my sights on Capitol Hill’s Amante Pizza (9 Olive Way E, where Denny Way and Summit Avenue come together and where I get horrifically lost every time I try to walk there and you can just abandon all hope if you drive), a place with nicer atmosphere than an Olive Garden while serving what to the best of my understanding is the same reheated frozen food from a mass-market supplier and charging a premium price for it.

Or, put another way, it’s Robert Irvine and Gordon Ramsay going apoplectic at someone who think this is fine dining in back-of-house.

I mean, I’m not the world’s greatest photographer, especially with an LG K10 smartphone doing the bulk of the heavy lifting and my complete lack of artistic sensibility informing the quality of these shots, but if the cheese blend on this pasta dish looks like it should have the texture of an egg white omelette, that’s only because it has the texture of an egg white omelette.

The chicken commits a greater sin; it never rises above the level of quality of a chicken patty on a dollar menu chicken sandwich from a fast food joint — you know the type, the oversized chicken nugget you get on the chicken BLT in a Wendy’s 4-for-$4 meal. I mean, it’s a whole chicken filet, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t rise to the distinction that you’d expect from Wendy’s offering or even Burger King’s underrated Tendercrisp sandwich (it is, however, a fair piece better than McDonald’s version, so it’s got that going for it.)

The spaghetti they serve it over? Well, OK, it’s decent. As in it isn’t cooked to death nor served the super al dente that tends to get gritty in your back teeth. If a sit-down restaurant wants to charge $15.99 (and yes, that was the ask for this glorified fast food) for a pasta dish, this barely achieves the minimum acceptable standard. For 16 bucks I wanted it as good as I make it at home with a 99-cent box of Great Value and a three-dollar jar of Prego, and I’m not even sure they managed that (plus, that $3.99 serves four people who aren’t me.)

Although even that might be being overly kind, since this same dish cost me $9.29 when I ordered it from a corner joint in Connecticut this spring (College Pizza in Mansfield Center, to be specific), and any New Englander knows that “pretentious” and Italian food go together like vegans and a barbecue cookoff. Plus, the stuff anywhere in the Northeast corridor’s gonna taste better.

Come to think of it, even if I breaded and pan-fried this much chicken myself, I’d only be out three bucks if I used breasts and two if I used the vastly superior boneless thigh, and the breading would have actual flavor. So we’re talking three bucks’ worth of food for 16 and I don’t pay tax and tip when I make it at home so we’re talking 14 cents on the dollar.

What I’m saying is this is perfectly mediocre Italian food served in an atmosphere that is at least nice enough to take a date even as you’re going to get reamed in the wallet for the privilege relative to the value on offer.

At that point, why not just go to Olive Garden? Besides the existential despair that once led a girlfriend of mine, upon arrival there with me one Sunday afternoon, to quip “is this what our relationship has come to”, I mean. (gods, I miss that girl.)

PROS: The food is decent, the atmosphere is nice enough that you wouldn’t be embarrassing yourself taking a date here, and it gets you out of the house.

CONS: They’re charging restaurant-with-a-chef prices for reheated frozen chicken, the cheese is comically overcooked to the degree where it gets rubbery, and if you can’t nail the pasta texture, you shouldn’t be serving Italian food for real money. This perpetuates my belief that there is literally no good Italian food worth eating in all of Seattle, and it’s not just me being an area snob from having grown up in Boston.

THE VERDICT: 2 out of 5 stars. Barely passable but there are so many better places to spend 20 bucks.