campagnola /sprazza (westwood edition)

A slight detour from our usual east side dining left us in westwood on friday night. i've only eaten at a small handful of restaurants in Westwood. Our intended destination for the evening was Sprazzo, which I've actually eaten at before. After 15 minutes of waiting to order a bottle of wine, couple with a rude bitter short little man of a waiter, we walked out. Haven't had to do that in quite some time. Shocking considering the popularity of that establishment. Overpriced and rude, like some many other Los Angeles establishments.
Strolling down a couple of blocks to Campagnola allowed me some time to put that bitter little man out of my head. We were greeted by the apparently well known and friendly owner, seated immediately and we were back on track to get some Italian food.
As you'll see below, I started using the flash for the photography. Not sure how i feel about it, but it does make it quite a bit easier to shoot.


First up, the appetizers. I don't know how authentic these staples for us are, but the calamari was served hot and crisp. The fresh mozz was good but not amazing, which sadly is above average recently. No complaints. Our waiter's knowledge of the wine list was lacking, but then again so was mine. We went through a couple of bottles of a 2000 chianti from Castello di [what was that name]. Anyway, a pretty nice bottle of wine all things considered.



On to the rest.
i ordered a specialty of the house, malloreddusu (s sardinian pasta) and had high expectations. The dish, while OK, left a little to be desired, the sauce tasted like a very basic marinara and the flavor of the sausage did not blend well with it. Almost as if it was an afterthought and added very last minute. Some other notable issues with dinner included the virtually inedible mashed potatoes served with a rather incongruous melange of chicken breast, lemon sauce and prosciutto. Overall, everything was decent. Nothing stood out as glaringly wrong or notably delicious. The pastas were all cooked al dente, but not even my malloreddusu was made fresh which is always disappointing.


farfalla ala panna
prosciutto, peas and mushrooms in a light cream sauce




In my opinion this is where the evening went from decent to not that good. Panna cotta was over cottad, to the point where is was an extremely stiff gelatinous mess not resembling the nice custard like texture it should have had. The tiramisu was of the extremely spongy, cut from a large baking pan sized piece, not creamy enough nor textured enough. But tasty nevertheless, so I wouldn't say I hated it, but its just not the type of tiramisu favored by 4 out of 5 dentists or paleontologists. I did also notice dificulty in coercing some cream out of the kitchen for coffee.