Restaurant Review: La Tagliatella, Arlington

I might be biased here. This restaurant moved into the location recently vacated by Restaurant 3...a bacon restaurant. Those are some huge shoes to fill.

The (confusing) menu at La Tagliatella does indeed include bacon. And cream sauce. And pesto. And cheese. But check out the menu and Command-F chicken. That's right, there is NO CHICKEN. What the hell kind of place doesn't serve chicken??

I got over the absence of fowl quickly when I noticed the prosciutto pizza.

While we waited, our waitress brought out a dish of the tiniest olives I've ever seen in my life. They were the size of small blueberries. And we got like eight of them.

The Caesar salad has actual anchovies on it. I guess that's pretty Italian and stuff, but I find anchovies to look like little dead aliens.

Our food finally came. Well, MY food finally came...a good 10 minutes before any of the other five people in my party. So I sat with this thing in front of me:

Note the small plate containing anchovies and the smallest olives ever.

This was not the prosciutto-mozzarella-tomato deliciousness I expected. It was a huge nearly sauceless, nearly cheeseless crust COVERED in a layer of prosciutto. And it wasn't cut...instead, it came with a pizza cutter shoved between the pizza and the plate, so you can do it yourself! Fun! No. NOT fun, since the edges of this thing hung over the sides of the normal-sized plate by two inches all around, making it impossible to cut with the completely dull pizza cutter. I ended up eating it by ripping pieces off. Seriously, they couldn't take five seconds and fucking cut this ridiculous thing for me?

No one else's food was much better. The lunch portions of pasta were like 10 pieces of pasta on a tiny plate. 

It's impossible for me to tell what kind of vibe this place is going for. The decor is just like a wannabe-fancy Ruby Tuesday's. I kept expecting to find a salad bar somewhere, complete with those brown croutons that look like miniature brownies. 

Are those brownies on your salad??

I will say, the desserts looked pretty good.  Unfortunately, since it was a business lunch, there was no time to partake, but the lemon gelato was tempting.

This place is just shitty Italian. And I feel like it's really hard to make Italian shitty. (I mean, come on...how do you screw up a pizza or pasta?) But seriously, Olive Garden beats this place by a mile. At least they have breadsticks.