Where are all the good Italian restaurants in Madison?

I love this town, really I do. It's fairly cultured but the traffic isn't ridiculous. There are museums and gardens and a fantastic farmer's market. There is a pretty skyline but there are also dudes ice fishing on the lakes. The city elections are between Democrats and Greens. But where is the good Italian food?

I grew up in Iowa. Yeah, I'm not ashamed of it. But I have had better Italian food in Davenport than I can find in this city that prides itself on being the eating capital of the Midwest. (The restaurant in Davenport, by the way, is called Trattoria Tiramisu, and it's fucking fabulous. If you find yourself, heaven forbid, in the Quad Cities on the Iowa-Illinois border, check it out.)

This outburst arises because my hubbie and I tried Tutto Pasta on State Street this last weekend. I wanted a heaping plate of delicious pasta, perhaps with a bruschetta appetizer, and a good bottle of wine. I wanted a candle on the table, a quiet atmosphere, and good service. I made 7:30 reservations on a Saturday night at a downtown restaurant which a few misguided people have told me has the best pasta in town.

Bullshit, I say. We arrive on time (amazingly, since Ben Folds was playing at the theater across the street and we had to park miles away) and I'm pleased with the place when we first go in. There are cozy tables, the clink of glasses, and a pretty impressive wooden bar well-stocked behind with wine bottles. However, the waitress leads us to the basement. Why is it that when we have reservations at a restaurant, we get the crappiest table there is, yet if we arrive unprepared, we get window seats? But I digress. The basement could have been cozy as well if they would clean the floors and turn the music down. The floor is tile and the walls are cement and everything echoes. The table had a white table cloth - covered on top with white paper. I hate this. If I'm going to drop $15-$20 on an entree, let me get pasta shrapnel all over the damned table linens. The paper ones stick out and make unromantic crinkly sounds and just ruin the ambiance thoroughly.

The waiter is prompt, but the water he brings is in plastic Pepsi glasses. He takes our wine order and is very polite and helpful. When he brings the wine, he opens it all professional-like and lets us have a taste. The wine ends up being the best part of the meal, only because the restaurant had nothing to do with its production.

There are A LOT of veggie things on the menu. I'd go so far as to say that half the menu was vegetarian items, and that's impressive. This can mean an awful lot to a vegetarian; so often we are forced to choose from two half-assed dishes that the restaurant owner felt obligated to put on the menu, one salad and one pasta dish. However, I'm having a swell time picking out my food, and it all looks quite good - porcini mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes and vodka cream sauce. Yum!

We order (I got the fettuccine Montana, with porcinis and tomatoes) and the food arrives pretty quickly. So far, everything that I don't like is forgivable, as long as the plucky Tutto Pasta can make up for it with good food.

Alas, this is not to be. My food is utterly bland, and as I'm eating I start to understand the menu's variety. They just take the same few sauces, pour it atop the same five kinds of pasta, and add the same eight veggies, in different combinations. It's clear no one put any love at all in the sauce, and if sauce needs anything to be good, it's love. I wouldn't be surprised to find out it came from a jar, or worse, a can. The pasta was overdone in some spots and underdone in others, like there was a continually boiling pot of fettuccine on the stove to which the cooks kept adding pasta when it would run low, combining fresh pasta with stuff that had been in there for hours and not paying attention to if it was done or not when removing it. Bland food I can stand; it's still edible. But, I really wish they had bothered to wash the mushrooms, though. I understand porcini mushrooms can be gritty when you buy them, fresh or dried, but for heaven's sake, wash them before you serve them. Hence, my pasta was sandy and tasteless.

This is what Italian restaurants routinely do. Inherently, the food they serve is cheap. Pasta is cheap to buy and it's even cheaper if you make it yourself (and not that hard). I am starting to get the idea that Italian restaurant owners see an opportunity to make a meal for $2 and charge $17 if you sprinkle the plate with a little parsley. It's not a food that anyone needs to labor over. You boil it, cover it with sauce, and voila! You made fifteen dollars!

Here is my recommendation for Italian dining in Madison. Take the paper off your kitchen table. Go to Whole Foods, get some RP's, a couple tomatoes, make yourself a nice alfredo sauce:

2 Tbs butter
3+ cloves garlic
1 cup heaving whipping cream
1/2 cup freshly-grated parmesan (I'm not joking; grate it yourself)
1/2 tsp nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste
Chives to garnish

turn on music you like to listen to, and enjoy.