Mr C's (102 Avenue C)

I finally had a chance to visit Alphabet City's newest Italian Trattoria, Mr C's, located at 7th Street & Ave. C. I braved the rain with my Mom around 8pm last night & we found the place pretty empty. After standing around the door for a bit, we decided to seat ourselves. It didn't take that long for our waiter to bring over our menus & explain that they were BYOB. I had already known that & gave some thought to going to Alphabet City Wine Co. next door & picking up a red, but I wasn't in the mood for drinking.

The service continued downhill from there, we sat around twiddling our thumbs till our water came by, so we ordered an appetizer while deciding that to get for our mains. After a further wait, we ordered our main dishes & asked to ensure if our appetizer had been fired (it had). We started with the fried calamari which were cooked very well, the marinara sauce that accompanied it was somewhat bland. Not a bad start to the meal at all though.

I ended up getting the rigatoni with tomato sauce & prosciutto. It was really light & tasty particularly with the flavor of the cured meat. My only real gripe with this dish is that whoever had prepped the prosciutto had been lazy. He had obviously stacked several slices to be cut into lengths, but they were just dropped into the dish/sauce as a whole & not separated, so eating the prosciutto was like biting into a big chunk of meat, I had to separate the individual pieces myself.

My Mom ordered the lasagna which was absolutely massive! I think everyone has their own view on how lasagna should be served; mine would be a small square with layers of meat, tomato sauce, cheese & pasta stacked vertically. Mr C's dish was nothing like this, it was a served on it's side, with thick layers of pasta (3-4 deep, all stuck together), meat & cheese, the tomato sauce seemed almost an afterthought & was spooned on top of the dish. Needless to say it did not look very appealing & the cheese overpowered the entire dish.

The food was passable (particularly considering the price; $8-9 for pasta), the BYOB policy was a plus, but the service was pretty atrocious. Our waiter was more interested in sitting down & talking to his friends that were dining there than attending to his customers. We had to scream to get salt & pepper and there was a lengthy wait for him to pick up my credit card after we had asked for our check.

Not sure if these are teething issues as this is a fairly new place, but I doubt I'll be going back there any time soon.