Luciano’s Ristorante Italiano

Location: Lawrenceville, Ga
 This place is a little fancier than you would expect, pulling into the Kroger parking lot to find a spot. The hostess is a little pretentious, and the restaurant seems like it might be with the white tablecloths and decor, but if you can get past that, the food is pretty good. It seems to be a popular lunch spot, as it got pretty crowded today, and it is listed #5 on tripadvisor.com for the city in which it’s located.

The menu is quite limited; so, if you’re looking for an extensive, authentic Italian menu, you might want to go down the road to Carrabba’s. I ordered off of the daily specials menu, because for the price of a simple entree, I could choose the  “3 course entrees.” You get the choice of soup or salad, an entree and a dessert for $12.95.

I had a Caesar salad, pizza mafia (pepperoni, sausage, bacon, black olives) and tiramisu. My husband ordered a Chicken Caesar, and our youngest got the kids pepperoni pizza. Everything was delicious, but the tiramisu was just ok. It seemed more custard/pudding based and was served in this tiny ramekin (like 1-2oz. size!); so, I was a little disappointed at that point.

The bread that is served before the meal is accompanied by this brouchetta-eske sauce with parmesan cheese sprinkled on top. Yum! …and I’m not even a tomato fan. The sweet tea is really good; however, as the entrees came, our glasses were changed from these really cool, large glasses to these rather small glasses. So, we had to keep asking for refills. I thought that a little odd. Shouldn’t the larger glasses be served with the meal?

Anyway, the food was good, and we might drop back by sometime…if we’re in this parking lot at lunchtime, but I don’t think we will make a special trip. The regular menu prices seemed a little steep for lunch, and they don’t seem to have a wide variety of choices. However, my opinion may be a little skewed by our personal experience, because once our entrees were served, we didn’t see our waitress again for about 20+mins. (Time enough for us to finish, sit waiting, and my husband and son to “give up” and head for the car.) She finally arrived back in the room, put her apron back on behind the bar and came over to the table to ask me if she should box up the leftover pizza.

That’s when my tiny dessert was served by another waiter. She never seemed the slightest concerned about her absence, even when I graciously mentioned we had to hurry now, because we didn’t know it was going to take so long. Yeah, those moments of frustration, and the disappointment in the dessert,  may have slanted my opinion a bit.

Despite this, I chose to blog this “treat,” because of the TA rating, the amount of traffic they received during the lunch hour, and the food was rather tasty. Maybe we just got a bad waitress, and it’s usually better. Maybe we need to try it for a date night, too… maybe…

Check out their website here.