Dino

I will say this. You will not leave Dino hungry. The portions are generous, although I wish they had been generous portions of better food: Dino is more disappointment than delicious.

It all started with a Tasting Table email about Dino's 6th birthday dinner special: 4 courses for $39, and with words like rabbit and prosecco, how could we resist?!

Service was slow, from the bartender to the food runners (I think we waited 30 minutes between our apps and pasta course), although the water guy was on top of things. We started with the cichetti, which was just sad. All of the bread was soft, the greens were *incredibly* bitter, and it was really just blah. And salty. I didn't eat half of mine, although I did savor the shrimp head on one of Pat's cichetti, which was very good.

Our pasta courses were equally not particularly well executed. Pat got two enormous duck canelloni, which I think had cardamom or some other very unique spice in them. They were decent, although a little dry. My pasta was so salty I think my blood pressure will be high for the next month as a result. Honestly, if you're going to put anchovies in pasta, you probably don't need to finish it with sea salt. It was a shame, because the pasta itself was cooked perfectly. I only ate half the bowl. Which trust me, is a very rare occurrence!

We were most excited about the secondi: rabbit for me and whole branzino for Pat. The rabbit was very lean and pretty good, although a bit overcooked. The same was true for P's fish.

Desserts were sad as well. Not bad, per se, but the tiramisu could have been a lot more boozy, and the nico just looked like a big, plastic rectangle. (the gelato was slightly better than plastic. slightly.)

As usual for our restaurant misses, the dinner was not awful. It just wasn't very good, especially for the price. I only wish we had bought the living social deal the day before so we could have wasted $30 less on this meal. (x-posted to yelp.com)