Pasta Bowl Italian Mix

It is time to even out some of that bad karma I tend to dole out on my blog. So I would like to give a bit of a positive review for once.

Pasta Bowl Italian Mix in St. Peters, Missouri accidentally found us this weekend. You see we made it up to St. Louis on Saturday for a another full weekend of playing hockey and we had about an hour until we needed to met up with the rest of the team at the rink. We were a bit hungry in the car so we drove down Mid Rivers Mall Drive on the look for some good eats. And there we saw it, on the horizon, Red Robin. That is some good eats, so we pulled in to the parking lot but we noticed that there was alot of people standing around and that wouldn't do because we didn't have time to wait. (Also playing hockey on a stomach full of hamburger didn't sound the best.) So we pulled out of the parking lot and noticed the place across the way called Pasta Bowl Italian Mix, after a quick vote in the car we kept on driving up the street to see what else we could find.

Luckily for us we ran out of food places fairly fast and we had to pull a U and we decided that we would just go eat at Panera. It turned out that traffic was bad and we ended up stopped in front of the entrance to the Pasta Bowl, and after another quick vote we decided to just eat there.

Best decision ever.

The restaurant turns out to be like Noodle's and Co. but it only does Italian food. The interior was very nice and modern and the prices were fair $7.50 for a bowl of pasta and a Coke. We ended up ordering a good variety of things and all of them were very good, actually they were all great. It was real Italian food (I should know; I have to eat Italian food made by Italians quite a bit during the holidays). The kicker was the owner (?) of the place that was just the nicest guy around. He was defiantly Italian (he had heavy stereotypical accent and all) and it showed that he cared very much for his food and his customers. In fact if it wasn't for him the Pasta Bowl would not be the topic of a post on my blog. But he was the kind of guy that you just have to smile because he likes doing what he is doing so much.

Well we had a good lunch and we headed on out to Matteson Square Triplex for our games, during which we played admirably (read: we lost). After the team headed back to the motel and showered and all, the topic of dinner came up. Jerry, our coach, said that he would like to try the place, if we didn't mind eating there again (we didn't). So we lugged our posse of 16 people out to the Pasta Bowl that had (we learned later) dismissed everyone to go home but two workers. When we arrived the guys at the place called some people to come back to work to help out and the owner came back to the store. This time when the owner saw us it was almost like a scene from an Italian Cheers episode: "Hey, you-a come back!" He actually seemed thrilled to have to come back to work late at night to get the food cooked for us.

Even though the staff apologized for saying that it took along time to get our food out, we all got our food in less than 15 minutes, which was a pretty good accomplishment considering there was only one cook. It turned out that the team thought that the place was good, and some guys seemed like the place even better than I did. Our Coach said that the Pasta Bowl will go on our (short) list of places to eat while in town, and we have already told the owner of the place that we will be back up there next weekend.

I know it sounds like I am paid to post this, but really I am not. I just wanted to give credit to people that really do a good job. I am of the thought that if you are going to make a restaurant, make it a great restaurant, and the Pasta Bowl is a great restaurant. Both because the food was good and because the people that ran the place were even better.

p.s. It also made me think that everyone should smile more often, it makes the world a happier place.