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East Side Mario's

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

East Side Mario's is the "fast food" of Italian food. It is a chain with over 100 locations. The food is relatively affordable, although nothing fancy. It is frequently very salty, so you'll probably find yourself drinking water all evening. One of the advantages of East Side Mario's is the free bread and salad that come with a number of the entrees. By having lots of bread and salad, you will probably be too full to eat your full dinner, meaning you can take it home and have it later. This is a clever way to get two dinners for the price of one.

Cost

Entrees around $13-20

Dress

Anything goes

Items Ordered

Garlic Bread

This is a very simple loaf of white bread. It has a very small amount of seasoning on top (you can't notice the taste). It is served with butter. It's a very typical loaf of white bread, but sometimes that's good.

Caesar Salad

A typical Caesar salad with some nice bacon bits. Frequently there’s too much dressing, so it’s better to get it on the side.

Garden Salad

Their signature garden salad comes with ice berg lettuce, croutons, baby tomatoes, olives, onions, and a hot pepper. Their salad dressing is really good on this salad, but every time I forget to ask for it on the side I regret it. When they put the dressing on themselves I find it just sinks to the bottom making the last bits soggy and gross. If you put the dressing on yourself it works out much better.

Grilled Chicken Fettucine with Lemon

Fettucine pasta tossed in a lemon infused Alfredo sauce with fire grilled peppers and red onions, topped with tender slices of grilled seasoned chicken breast.

This was a "summer special" menu item. It had a very nice lemon flavor. The chicken had a nice barbequed flavor that was quite good. There was a little too much onion and it seemed to be lacking in chicken and veggies for the amount of pasta that was there. I liked the use of both red and yellow sweet peppers. The dish was a little bit too salty, and would have been much better with whole wheat pasta.

Spinach and Ricotta Milanese

Rolled pasta medallions of ricotta, spinach and Parmesan baked in Alfredo and Napolitana sauces. Served with grilled asparagus spears.

This was not at all what I was expecting. I didn’t realize the medallions were so big. I was expecting something more like a dish with many small rolls. I was quite impressed by how these looked though. They were really fun to eat. The sauce was really cheesy and tasty. The medallions themselves were pretty good, but I thought the flavor of salt over powered any other flavor. There was a good amount of spinach in them, and they were overall quite tasty.