Sometimes life would be better if some people would admit that.

This is a food post.  Son and I were tooling around town the other evening and noted a new “Italian” eatery in the area that we’d not tried.  He commented that he’d heard it was pretty good.

So yesterday suppertime rolls around and we decide to give the place a try.

I should have known better, but in me, optimism is sometimes a flaw.

CLUE 1:  The place was named, more or less, “Jeaux’s Italian Food.”  Now for you folks not indigenous to Cajun country, the letters “EAUX” are pronounced as a long “o”, as in “Boudreaux” being pronounced “Boo-dro”. I never met a Cajun named “joe” who  spelled his name “Jeaux”.  I consider it to be an aggravating affection, like naming some cutesy emporium “shoppe”.  And why would somebody running an ITALIAN restaurant want to intentionally point out his Cajun-hood?

Clue 2: The building that is now an “Italian Restaurant” has been a half-dozen other restaurants in the past ten years.

Clue 3:  Walking into the place, the entire wait staff consisted of young girls, like twenty years old or (a lot) less.  I never saw the cook.

Bravely we went forward.  We ordered drinks and an appetizer.  Got that. Appetizer was shrimp and artichoke dip.  Their version was a few cooked shrimp, a few canned artichoke hearts, all submerged in Alfredo sauce. Meh…

Son ordered calamari and marinara sauce, an appetizer, as his entre’ seeing as how the appetizer was pretty substantial.

Me, i looked at the menu for ONE thing, spaghetti alla carbonara.  I love the stuff.  It’s so simple to make, I figured NOBODY would screw it up.  I mean, WOW!  You’re talking about bacon (pancetta is authentic) eggs, cheese, olive oil, salt and pepper.  And spaghetti. The name means spaghetti like a charcoal maker cooks.  It’s all stuff that doesn’t require refrigeration. It’s quick.

That ain’t what I got.  I got spaghetti.  Doused with Alfredo(!) sauce.  With a few pieces of Canadian bacon.  It wasn’t really BAD.  It just wasn’t what I expected.  It was just about as close to the real thing as Campbell’s canned “chicken gumbo” is to the stuff I was raised on.

The place needs to have a disclaimer on the menu:  “we have no idea what we’re doing here.  We’re just back there cooking stuff and the names on the menu don’t mean much.”