the pastabilities of Rezdora

As I’ve gotten older, my taste in birthday gifts has shifted. As cheesy as it sounds, nowadays I prefer experiences over tangible gifts. Specifically, meals. So, I decided the best way for me to spend my birthday dinner was at Rezdora, trying their pasta tasting.

To start, they gave us a little amuse bouche of cannoli filled with Parmesan cream and dusted with spinach powder. It was pretty tasty, as the cannoli itself was very crisp and light and went well with the Parmesan cream.

I also ordered a mocktail, which was pretty tasty as well.

The first course of this celebration of carbs was a tortellini en brodo. The pasta was perfectly cooked, and the flavorful broth went very well with the meaty tortellini. My only issue was I felt the tortellini were a bit small, so the overall pasta to filling ratio was a bit off.

The next course was a strichetti, or basically a farfalle pasta, verde con pomodoro with a Parmesan fonduta and basil. It was pretty good, but honestly kind of unmemorable. Also why did they use the largest cheese grater I have ever seen. I’m pretty sure it was longer than my arm.

Creamy mushroom pasta ragu, which was simple, but tasty. I mean, it’s hard not to like cheesy mushroom pasta.

The next course was the tagliolini al ragu, which again, was very tasty, but was not extraordinary. But, this was an extremely tiny portion.

The last pasta course was the anolini with Parmesan cream and a drizzle of aged balsamic vinegar. This was my favorite pasta dish, partially because it was around when I actually started to get less hungry, but also the dish had a really nice balance of flavors. The acidic balsamic vinegar definitely lightened an otherwise very heavy and rich dish.

For dessert, we got the olive oil cake, which was probably my favorite part of the meal. The cake had a crisp exterior, a perfectly dense, rich interior. The sweetness of the frosting also went really well with the olive oil in the cake. This cake was so good, it led me to attempt to make olive oil cake the next day, which unfortunately was not as good as Rezdora’s.

They also gave us some pretty solid biscotti as well.

Overall, I really enjoyed my meal at Rezdora. I would not necessarily do the pasta tasting again, just because I felt like I was hungry through most of the meal, eating only a few bites at a time. But I would want to come back to try some of their more unique pastas, as I feel like most of the ones in the tasting menu were tasty, but not super memorable, as well as more of their non-pasta dishes.