IF you are a Canto-kid and young, hip and hungry, you will probably love Pertutti. Located in the heart of Causeway Bay, you will find it a great place to meet friends after shopping and the decor will suit your Western pretensions. What's more, the reasonably priced dinners will probably meet your budget.
Pertutti is good at what it does: pasta in a hurry. Think Pizza Hut meets McDonald's with a campus vibe. On the pavement outside the street-level cafe, a sandwich board details the choice of set dinners. It stands alongside a 1.5-metre wooden cut-out of a chef holding a tray of coffee beans.
Just as not all Frenchmen are good lovers, not all Italian restaurants are candlelit tables and serenading waiters. Do not expect to be shown to a table. Think school canteen. You give your order to the cashier, pay and shuffle your tray along the counter. Half a dozen young servers run in circles behind the counter.
We order two set dinners ($38) and wait five minutes for our trays to be loaded up. Meanwhile, we take in the colourful displays of pasta and olive oil and note the strings of plastic ivy. If we had been regulars, we would have known to request our favourite pasta. We are given bow tie pasta by default.
The set meals come with a choice of soft drink, soup and garlic bread.
There are a couple of tables downstairs, but the main restaurant is upstairs and seats 100. The walls are a muted orange and the pictures are hastily framed clips of Italian cuisine from various food magazines. It is 8pm and Pertutti is packed with twentysomethings enthusiastically tucking into their evening meal.
We approach ours with a little less enthusiasm. The mixed vegetable soup is weak and tastes like a ketchup-based broth laced with onion. The mushroom soup is the more impressive of the two and is a shade better than that served at Oliver's. The garlic bread is cold. Afraid that our main course will also become cold, we abandon the soup and move on to the pasta.
