Via Lago Gets a Thumbs Up

Last night it was just too hot to cook, so we went to Via Lago, out in Eastlake environs in Chula Vista. It's somewhere between Ralph's corner on E. H St at Southwestern College, and E. L street where the Lowe's is.  Up in there there's a  nice little shopping center of the Tuscan Village type, with a Trader Joe's and a Sprouts and a TJ Maxxx and various other places to shop and eat.  Via Lago is in there.  It is a branch of Busalacchi's of old that we knew in Hillcrest when we were young.

It's a pretty and a very nice restaurant with a professional staff and plenty of comfort and good food.  We expected something good and we were not disappointed. Theo, with his hollow space where a tooth was removed the day before, was foredestined to have spaghetti and not much else, and that is what he had.  I opted for the saltimbocco, which were very small tiny escalopes of beef or veal in a delicious gravy. There were four of them. And there was a side of quite a bit of ravioli with fresh tomato/rosemary sauce.  There was spinach with the meat.  It was all very tasty and delicious.  I had a huge goblet of delicious chianti for about seven fifty.  The cost of that food was fifty dollars plus a tip of ten dollars.  If we had had salads or desserts the price of the meal would have doubled or tripled.  Fortunately we are old and cannot eat much more than we got.  As it is, we each brought home half our dinners, and traded off today and I got the spaghetti and he got 2 escalopes plus ravioli...we were both pleased.  So our dinner was really two meals for 50 dollars,==a dinner and a lunch the following day for two people.

The main point is that it was delicious, well prepared food, served with care by people who knew what they were doing.  Grade: A.  I only wish I had the appetites and capacities of a person in her twenties who could have appreciated the salad and the dessert along with the rest of the meal.  And they had some good sounding  appetizers, too.  I'd like the mushroom crepe, on a winter's evening sometime. Oh, and they served a pretty good peasant bread with oil and balsamic vinegar to keep us calm till the food arrived. YAZZYBEL