Cibo
Happy New Year to all ! After a month of holiday obligations and festivities that made it necessary for Mr. Z and I to forego our regular Tuesday Night adventure….we’re finally back and ready. We hope that you are too.
Our first adventure in this new year took us way out to Cibo in ChagrinFalls. As we are ever searching for “real” NY pizza (not just what they profess to be authentic), he thought this may be the answer. Their website sounded promising – Italian family, mom & pop with 5 daughters, homemade pasta daily, etc. REAL Italian – or so we were hoping! Alas, a HUGE disappointment! While the family was really nice and the type of people that you wish to have much success – they have a LONG way to go. The place is cute, though small and since we were the only ones in there, I’m guessing that whatever business they do is mainly carryout. The menu is very basic. Daily housemade pasta, which unfortunately is strictly cavatelli – no angelhair, no rigatoni, no penne…. JUST cavatelli. With this you have a selection of about 9 different sauces, some of which sounded very interesting. Plus they have just added pizza to their menu. In addition, there are a few “add-ons” such as meatballs, sausage, side salad, and BREAD (yes, you must pay an extra $1.00 for 2 slices of bread – thankfully it was GOOD bread). We decided to go with the pasta and a simple meat sauce, and added a meatball (just to try it), 2 side salads, 2 ORDERS of bread, and a small 4-cheese pizza (again, just to see if it was any good). We were going to share the pasta and the pizza. OK, here’s the scoop – no knives on the tables and no salt & pepper shakers. When our salads were brought out, they consisted of iceberg lettuce, tomato “cubes” and cheese – nothing else! The house dressing was an Italian which at least was very good. Salads were pretty boring! By the time she delivered the bread, we were almost done with our salads, but the bread looked good, only problem was….no butter. We had to ask and she seemed genuinely surprised! When the butter came, we had no knives, so again…. we had to ask! Already had a few strikes against them. Our pasta came out and honestly I’m not sure how they could call that “meat sauce”. It was very watery and bland and we counted maybe 4 or 5 small pieces of ground meat in it. Such a huge disappointment, however, we said nothing. A short time later, she brought out our pizza which looked really good. The crust was nice and thin (just like NY) and it was loaded with cheese (also good) but the problem was that there was very little sauce on it and what there was didn’t have much taste to it. Good consistency, but pretty boring as well. Overall, we were hugely disappointed with this whole experience. The people were very nice and with this being a “whole family” business, they deserve to be successful; however unless some drastic changes are made, I can’t see how they will be. I’m not sure how long they’ve been open but would like to think that they are still in the learning process, but I fear that’s not the case. Would we give a “2 thumbs up” recommendation to Cibo???? We’d like to, but we think not – sorry!!!
Cibo is located at: 8564 E. Washington StreetinChaginFalls.
(440) 543-0363
http://cibohomemadepasta.net/home.html