Maggianos Little Italy

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Maggianos Little Italy

March 29, 2008 by leavesoflife

As the name suggests, Maggianos is an Italian Restaurant catering Italian-American dishes. This is our second visit to this restaurant. The first time we went there was on May 2006 after watching preview show of the movie “Over the hedge” at the Century Theatres.

Maggianos is centrally located in San Jose, CA. It is in Santana Row - a upscale shopping/dining/residential district. There are lot of shops, spas, boutiques, coffee shops to laze around. A nice little fountain and play structure in front to Maggianos attracts lots of families with kids. Across from Maggianos is the famous Winchester Mystery House and Century Theartes.

From our first visit we remember Maggiano’s to be an expensive(the entrees being $20 or so) and not a casual dining place. But we were totally mistaken from our visit today(one of the reasons for this blog). We found the place to be reasonably priced and we saw mixed crowd of both casual and fine diners.

Maggiano’s dining room looks small, catering about 100 diners but their capacity is 546. They have banquet halls and other rooms which cater to parties. There was wedding, couple of baby showers and a 65th birthday party during lunch hour.

We went there about 12.15 PM and were seated immediately. We were served warm bread with butter and olive oil + vinegar on the side upon seating. But the order was taken 15 minutes later. DH ordered the “Mushroom Ravioli al Forno” and i the “Angel Hair, Coach Joey Z’s Pomodoro Sauce” with a side order of Minestorne Soup.

Since we are bread loving family and wait time for the food to arrive was a quite a bit, we ended up having lot of bread. The first batch of bread was warm but the consecutive ones were not. The time taken for the subsequent batches of bread was also significant. Minestrone soup came couple of minutes before the entrees. The soup was decent, lot of chunky vegetables including potatoes. I could feel the tomato base. Not many beans tough.

The pasta serving size was huge. It had a sweet taste and i knew there was something which i had not tasted before(found out it was white wine when i was writing this). DH’s entree was too rich because of the al forno sauce. He did not like it since the sauce spoiled the taste of the raviolis. Got a to go box for the pasta.

No desserts, too full. Not too expensive, the bill was about $25 which is reasonable for us.

Overall it was OK, could have been better. We will go sometime later in the year to try other dishes.

We went lazing around Santana Row after lunch since it was a pleasant day. Found our way to The Container Store and picked up few items in their spring sale event.