Brett N.
Yelp
Why 5 stars? Because this was the best gnocchi I've ever had.
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After our world-class dinner the night before, I was worried about a letdown experience for dinner #2 in Positano. While it wasn't as amazing as the restaurant we visited for dinner #1, this was still an absolute no-doubt about it 5-star experience!
For six days in Italy, I tried to eat a different pasta dish every night, and one of those dishes was gnocchi. I lived a life tragically sheltered from Italian food as a kid, and never even heard of Gnocchi until I was in my late 20's. How horrible is that?! But once I discovered it, I've been pretty smitten by it.
With that being said, I've probably only had gnocchi a handful of times, but this was definitely my all-time favorite. And anytime you score an all-time favorite dish, the restaurant is obviously doing something right!
My wife ordered manicotti, but it was a little too heavy on the marina - probably more of a 4-star quality dish, in our humble opinion.
We also ordered prosciutto and mozzarella for an appetizer and panna cotta for dessert - both were absolutely phenomenal!
The house white wine and the bread were alright. And lastly, the servers seemed a bit pushier here to get us to spend more money, while we didn't get that vibe from any other restaurant in all of Europe. It wasn't overwhelming, but there was just a hint of "sales-y-ness" that we could have done without.
So that about sums up our experience with the food, but I wanted to include details on the very unique dining situation.
People in Italy drive like crazy animals - I think we can all agree on that (except maybe Italians themselves.) The entire time we were traveling through Italy, I felt like I was taking my life into my hands anytime I walked near a road or got in a vehicle.
In Positano, there's only one winding road (one lane, one way) that travels through the town. Because of this, the driving is not as crazy as Naples or Rome, but it's just nowhere near as courteous as it would be in the United States. Despite businesses surrounding these roads and people walking along the sides of the road (not sidewalks, but actually on the road) - cars still zoom by without much regard for the possibility of danger. And in many cases, these pedestrians are accompanied by small children or animals. No one here seems to think twice about it, but if people drove through narrow roads like that in the U.S. there would be some serious conflict.
So how does that apply to the restaurant? Well the outdoor seating is on the right side of the aforementioned one lane road, while the restaurant itself is on the left side. That means our table sat maybe two arms length away from cars zooming by all night. I seemed to be the only person amazed by this, so apparently it's just normal and accepted behavior in Positano. But what was really funny is that the servers had to play frogger to get from the restaurant to the outdoor tables all throughout the evening. It was especially mind blowing when the server would be standing a couple of feet away from our table explaining something to us, and a car would fly by at around 30 MPH. He's standing in a narrow roadway with cars driving by, at night, explaining the nightly specials to us. And it's normal. Italy, I love you.