I don’t try to put a label on food, the way you would with films or books, or even TV shows. I think that actively trying while you’re eating takes away from the food somehow, and that isn’t good: if you don’t enjoy your food, then what’s the point of eating it? I normally find that it’s better to take the food as it comes, then put a label on it later when you don’t have satisfying your hunger on your mind. Recently, however, I came upon one restaurant whose food was so bad that I wanted to put a label right then and there so that I could get right out of there. It’s name was DiMaggio’s Trattoria.

My first impression of this Italian horror was the size. It was tiny. There was a well-stocked bar at the back, which seemed to take up more than half the restaurant. It wasn’t Starbucks small, but it was small for a sit-down place. It was very well lit, which seems to be a rarity for authentic places. The lighting, in fact, seems to be the only good thing I can say about the place.

The bread basket was too cold, leaving the bread hard and unsatisfying. The menus were easily legible, but without an ounce of pizzazz, so to speak. I don’t take off huge points for a lack of menu creativity, but I’d like a little bit if I can get it (Indian restaurants are particularly adept at this, among their myriad of strong points). As for the choices themselves, they were your standard Italian restaurant favorites. There wasn’t any fish though, which greatly added to the disappointment factor.

I ordered penne a la vodka, my backup Italian restaurant choice when I can’t find fish. My sister Mia ordered chicken francese, a similarly unoriginal predilection. Mom ordered eggplant rollatini, similar to eggplant parmesan, her favorite. Dad, ever the daredevil, ordered sausage and peppers with penne marinara.

The waiting period took an unusually long time, almost half an hour. When the food actually came, I was disappointed from the beginning. The sauce was wrong. For those who don’t know vodka sauce is made by mixing tomato sauce with vodka, typical Italian herbs, and the tiniest amount of heavy cream. The vodka is supposed to release normally inaccessible levels of flavor in the tomato; the herbs give it some extra flavor; and the cream gives it some substance. Done correctly, it can be a masterpiece of Italian cooking. But if it is done incorrectly, as it was here, the result is a distasteful, jarring mess.

The sauce here contained unusually high levels of that easy-to-mess-up heavy cream. In fact it tasted as though the restaurant was short on tomatoes, so they compensated by putting in too much cream. It looked and smelled like cheese, and I hate cheese under most circumstances. Wanting another opinion, I invited my family to taste. Mia said it was okay and that she wasn’t a huge fan. Dad said it was nice, but that he would have preferred it to be less creamy. Mom inexplicably said she liked it. Understandably we didn’t stay for dessert. Take my advice. If you want a nice local Italian dinner to tide you over or the night, DO NOT go to DiMaggio’s Trattoria under any circumstances.