Friday, January 2, 2015

Restaurant Review: Doppio Zero Pizzeria Napoletana

Doppio Zero - dinner on December 12, 2014
A few friends and I are starting to have a monthly dinner club going on. We meet at one of the many restaurants on Castro St in Mountain View and have pledged to try a different one each month. We’ve done Asian Box (or at least Queen of Cheap Eats and I have) and Blue Line Pizza so far. For December, we stayed on the same block and went to Doppio Zero, a little Italian restaurant. Doppio won out from the options we discussed since they took reservations and that made it easier for us to plan rather than hoping a restaurant on a popular street during the holiday season would have a table for 4 ready without a long wait.

I have a tendency to want to mainline carbs, particularly bread and pasta, so Doppio Zero is my kind of restaurant. There was the requisite bread basket with warm slices of baguette and a pleasing variety of options on the menu from pastas to pizzas and other traditional Italian fare. I went with the lasagna, one person got the gnocchi, another the ravioli and our fourth member got the spaghetti with clams. The mark of a good restaurant? We all liked our entrees. We even liked each other’s orders from the sampling we did from everyone else’s plate (we’re girls, we’re not shy about stuff like that). My own lasagna was delicious although the portion size meant I had enough for 3 more meals that weekend.

Gnocchi
Not only that but our wandering eyes noted all the delicious-looking orders being delivered to nearby tables and we started planning ahead to what we would want to order next time we came: the fried calamari appetizer for Queen of Cheap Eats, the pizza for another, the calzone for me. And the gnocchi for a different person who liked the sample she tried from the other person’s plate. 
Ravioli
The prices were reasonable as well, which is always a plus(!). Our wait person was nice, service was good and the manager (I assume he was the manager) stopped by our table to make sure we were happy. We were.
Lasagna

My only disappointment was the dessert. Doppio Zero’s dessert offerings leaned a bit too much to custard-y desserts (cheesecakes, tiramisu, etc) but I thought the chocolate cake was promising so we ordered 2 slices to split among the 4 of us. We toyed with the idea of each of us getting our own slice of chocolate cake but I think we were trying to be grownup and go with the sharing concept. Which turned out to be a good call as the chocolate cake was just okay. It was chocolate, it was decent but I wasn’t wowed. I suspect they contract out their desserts or don’t make it inhouse because it wasn’t the same standard as our entrees were. Still, the main courses were so good that none of us had any trouble foregoing our original plan of trying out a new restaurant every month and instead decided that for our next outing, we were coming back to Doppio to try out more entrees. Can't offer a better recommendation than that.


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