Restaurant Review: Tutto Pasta and Trattoria

Posted on February 26, 2011 by Kelly

**Unfortunately as of Winter 2013 this restaurant is now closed**

Full Disclosure: I paid for this meal with my own money and I was in no way reimbursed for this blog post. The opinions are completely my own.

If there was one thing that I could eat every day, it would be pasta.

Pasta comes in so many different varieties, and the things you can add to a pasta dish are endless.

Tutto Pasta Trattoria, in Middleton (not to be confused with Tutto Pasta Cucina downtown) has any kind of pasta you could imagine. Pasta dishes filled with veggies, meats, and seafoods.

The meal starts off with warm bread and olive oil for dipping. Any restaurant that serves their food with warm bread has won me over from the start

For dinner, I chose the Fettucini Scampi.

The husband chose the Fusili Emilane.

The entree’s range from about $12 and up – which is not exactly cheap. However, you do get a LOT of food – definitely enough to have leftovers for lunch the next day.

Both of us liked our food, but we didn’t love it. It was good, and we both took home leftovers, but the leftovers didn’t get eaten.

Taste: B, not super delicious, but it definitely tasted like authentic Italian food.
Cost: C+, it really was pretty expensive for a normal night out to dinner. Considering that the food was not great, the atmosphere was kind of blah and the service was just ok.

Would I go there again? I’m not sure. It is a locally owned restaurant that is right down the road for where we live, so convenience may play a bigger factor that the food quality and cost.

Its funny how people say that Tutto Pasta Trattoria (What this review was about) and Tutto Pasta Cucina (essentially the same restaurant, but a different location in Madison.) are very different – and they don’t just mean their location. And I agree. The atmosphere of the Cucina is much more like I would imagine for a small Italian restaurant. Smaller spaces, friendly, happy, excited staff (even though they tend to be busier), and (from what I can remember) better food. I know at one point they were both owned by the same people, and just had two different locations, but maybe that isn’t the case anymore?

I should also note that it wasn’t exactly easy to find a website for either of the locations. Normally when I search “the restaurant name + the city” in Google, the restaurant website is in the top couple link. This time, Yelp reviews and local news articles came up much before (what appeared to be) the actual site for the restaurant. I say “what appeared to be” because the URL was not something like www.tuttopastatrattoria.com that you would expect it to be. It was this: http://www.foodspot.com/Clients/WI/Middleton/TuttoPastaTrattoria/default.aspx?accid=17468 And the website that I found for Tutto Pasta Cucina seemed more like what I was expecting: http://www.tuttopastacucina.com/ But if you click on that link, you will notice that you get a “404 Not Found” error….

Hmmmm.