Buca di Beppo, ninth circle of hell.

Are you saying that stuff happens in HP6? So it's not like Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground then?

So it's not like Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground then?

Or HP5, apparently.

only use ricotta, but I've had the cottage cheese sort, and provided the sauce is okay, it's fine, provided you mix in garlic, parsley, and eggs, like you would with the ricotta.

Ah. I see. The cottage cheese lasagne I had didn't have none o' that fancy foreign stuff in it.

Eggs? In lasagna? Why?

I've been eating both straight ricotta cheese and straight cottage cheese recently, and they're pretty similar. Different, but not strikingly different.

But I make lasagna without boiling the noodles, so make of that what you will.

I have no problem with Olive Garden in itself. I also like more authentic Italian food, but I just go elsewhere for that. At one point, just out of college, I had a boyfriend who made lasagna using his Italian grandmother's recipe. Oh, so good. He's a chef in an Italian restaurant somewhere in NM or AZ now.

Last weekend a friend took me to a Chinese restaurant in her neighborhood. The menu has things like "salad with cold jellyfish" and sea cucumbers on it. I wasn't feeling quite that adventurous, but I may try the former next time I go. Said friend is a regular. When we ordered sweet and sour shrimp the waitress said that wasn't very good, and she'd brought out a prawn dish instead that was amazing.

And Buca di Beppo has all kinds of tacky crap on the walls and tables.

They're like the "Italian" version of T.G.I.Friday's.

There's even a table in the kitchen, which, to me, would mean FREE MEAL. It's not a treat to be put in the kitchen, folks. It's punishment.

I imagine that, to real Italians (or just Catholics in general), they're vaguely offensive.

It's not a treat to be put in the kitchen, folks. It's punishment.

Once I ate in a restaurant kitchen, and it was absolutely marvellous. Best meal I ever had, and it cost about $150 a head. Such an experience.

Not at Buca Di Beppo's, but still. The premise is one of which I'm fond.

My old department had a post-retreat meal in the Pope Room at BdB, which was actually pretty entertaining. All the Frat Pack music was getting to me, though. My sister once had dinner in the kitchen at the BdB near her, and she said that it was pretty fun--the cooks would bring over free stuff for them to try.

I found this in the Buca di Beppo image search: [link]

You gotta hate knowing that a picture of you grabbing your boobs in a tacky faux-Italian restaurant posing under a kitschy boob-related picture exists somewhere on the interbunny.