The Old Spaghetti Factory opened its very first restaurant in Portland in 1969. Since then, it has expanded its presence across North America in many major cities! The one we went to is at Tanasbourne in Hillsboro Oregon. This is quite a large restaurant and can accommodate a lot of people. In addition, I really like the interior design of The Old Spaghetti Factory. It has a lot of unique features and decorations that assemble the Italian culture. Many of its tables are also unique from one to the other. Some tables have chairs that are similar to King's chair. Some tables are inside this street car that you would see in Italy. At the entrance of the restaurant, you would also see rather pretty stain glass.
All the entree on the menu comes with a 3 course meal. For appetizer, you can choose between soup and salad. There are few choices of ice cream flavors that you can pick fro dessert. Also, The Old Spaghetti Factory offers some unique Italian drink. Italian Cream Soda is one of them. We did not order this drink this time, but we were told that it comes with a special glass and you can take it home afterwards.
After we placed our order, here comes a loaf of uncut bread. The bread is really hot and fresh! When I cut the bread to half, I could smell a fresh scent of wheat. The only difficult part for me is to hold down the bread when cutting it because the bread is way too hot! It also comes with a small cup of cream cheese. I just wish that they can give more cream cheese next time. After all, it is a whole loaf of bread! I guess they would have given more cream cheese if I have asked.
For appetizer, we ordered a green salad and soup. The salad is nothing special and there are several usual dressings that you can pick from. As for soup, there is only minestrone and it is like any usual minestrone soup.
The first entree we got is the Jumbo Crab Ravioli. As you can see from the picture, the ravioli in this dish is gigantic! These raviolis are filled with crab meat! I like this ravioli quite a lot because the only thing that is inside ravioli is crab meat. There isn't any cheese inside ravioli. The cheese is only part of the sauce. Speaking of the sauce, I wish that they could have put more sauce on the ravioli. As you can see from the picture, the creamy sauce only covered several raviolis but not all of them.
The second entree we ordered is the lasagna. Everything on the lasagna and in this lasagna is what I expected; however, I find this lasagna to be different from what I was expecting. I was expecting the lasagna to be baked with some crunchy crust. I did not find any crunchy part on this lasagna. I am not sure if this is what a real lasagna should be? It does have a lot of flavor though. It just surprised me with no crunchiness.
Finally here comes the dessert. We chose spumoni and rainbow sherbet. The spumoni ice cream has 3 flavors including chocolate, strawberry, and pistachio. I love the taste of pistachio. It has this sweet pistachio when you eat the ice cream. It is quite an unique and different taste. Rainbow sherbet is also good, but not as unique as spumoni. It is like any sherbet that has some sour and sweet taste.
Overall, The Old Spaghetti Factory is a decent Italian restaurant to go to once a while. The restaurant spent a lot of effort on its interior design to provide an absolute unique dining experience. I think there could be some improvement on the food though, but the dessert is quite amazing.
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