Acqua al Due (or Don't-Ay)

My travels recently took me to San Diego for a bachelorette party this past weekend. A great friend from UC Santa Barbara is getting married at the end of the month, so our entire clan was reunited to celebrate just north of the California border. We don't travel in small packs, and it often makes these events quite chaotic, chief among the events being the meals we try to have together. We're a loud, boisterous group of girls, and we like to make our presence known.

For dinner on Friday night, someone suggested Acqua al Due, the sister restaurant to the one in Florence, Italy. I found it to be an odd choice after having dined at the one in Florence; the ambiance lends itself more to a romantic date than a Joe's Crab Shack, which is quite frankly, much more our style.

After dining at both, I can now say that the San Diego one is clearly the red-headed step child. The service was slow (albeit mildly authentic), the bill was incredibly expensive for Italian food (more on that later), and the quality certainly didn't evoke the same memories I have of the Florence locale. The only David that was around the corner here was the one who checked us into the Hard Rock Hotel.

As far as dinner went, about the only thing that was okay (and just okay) was the blueberry filet mignon. The taste was good, but not great, and the concept looked like a piece of meat swimming in blueberry preserves. In fact, I'd venture to guess that's exactly what we were eating. At $33 for the steak (and steak only, with the exception of the blue-goo-sauce), it was almost laughable that they felt okay charging so much. C'est la vie in the restaurant world, I suppose.

But for a group of sixteen girls, which I'll admit is a large group and probably overwhelming for the staff, it was jaw-droppingly expensive when the bill was divvied up. Would you believe me if I told you the bill was more than $1,000 for our group? And yes, we were eating Italian food. I'm sorry, but unless my pasta is gilded in gold like Ghiberti's baptistry doors in Florence, then there is no reason for such a high price point.

I guess the moral of the story is you should save the Acqua al Due experience for Florence and Florence alone. In the attempt to bring the concept to the states, much of the original restaurant's charm (and delicious splendor) was left somewhere north of the Ponte Vecchio. And for the price of our meal, we could have easily hopped a plane to Europe for the real thing.