In celebration of my good friend Cicily's birthday, Betsy, Cicily and I thought it would be good to gorge on some comfort Italian food on a cold Thursday night. Galli is on a cute street in Soho that is almost boarding Chinatown. I had never seen or heard of it before but it's a cute space and a nice place to catch up with friends. The food is indeed Italian comfort food and it's solid but not completely mind blowing.
The menu is extensive with all types of big salads, pastas and main entrees. Seriously, they have 15 different kinds of pasta from penne vodka to carbonara to pesto. It was pretty overwhelming and it didn't help that we were all starving and our stomachs were bigger than our eyes. We started the meal with meatball sliders ($8), mozz chips ($11), tegamino ($12) and a caesar salad ($10). For entrees, I opted for the steak and fries ($20) since there we were having so many tomato based dishes already. Most of the appetizers came out first and fairly quickly. The meatball sliders were essentially little meatball parm bites on a slider bun. It was good but I would have preferred it as just a meatball, it didn't really need the bread on top of it but I appreciated the sentiment. The mozz chips turned out to be essentially mozzarella sticks but in square form instead of stick form. Again, it's hard to get fried cheese wrong but nothing that was necessarily any better than other forms of fried mozzarella I've had before. The tegamino is their version of a baked eggplant parm style. The eggplant was a bit overdone and it was hard to really get the taste of the eggplant as it was just drowning in sauce - again, not an awful dish but very standard. I, personally, am not a huge caesar salad fan and for me the salad was dressed all too heavily (although that is clearly the best, but most fattening part of any salad). I will say that all the apps were hitting the spot because of how hungry I was when I got there so when my steak and fries came out, I was already seriously stuffed. The steak was a skirt steak and I had asked for it to be medium rare. The cut of meat was a bit too thin for me (and yes, I know skirt steak is a thin cut of meat) but typically in an Italian place I'm used to a hanger steak or maybe even a flank steak cut, just something heartier. Since it was a thinner cut of meat, it was cooked through more than I would like. I will say that it was marinated very well and was very flavorful - I just wish it was a thicker, rarer piece of meat. I was so stuffed that I didn't even get to the fries but they looked good. I also didn't try either of Cicily or Betsy's pastas but they were really big bowls of pasta - unlike some of the smaller sized ones you'd find at some more higher end Italian places in the city.
The service was super friendly and flirty albeit a bit slow. But it was nice that they didn't bother us too much because it was great catching up and drinking. We felt a bit bad that we were occupying a table when there seemed to be so many people in the bar area waiting for a table but it was refreshing to not have to be shooed out of a table even if they needed it. Total bill: $250 for 3 people including tax, tip and 3 rounds of drinks.
Photo Credit: yelp
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