THIS RESTAURANT IS CLOSED Cucina! Cucina!

THIS RESTAURANT IS CLOSED Cucina! Cucina! Restaurant Review:

This is not only a place you can take the kids---you’ll feel like a kid again yourself dining under the bicycles and other whimsical decorations in these colorful, cacophonous Italian-inspired cafés. There's even an Italian conversation soundtrack playing nonstop in the restrooms. Born in the Puget Sound, this chain now extends to several western states. The pasta- and pizza-heavy menu is rounded out with salads and house specialties like veal Marsala and oil-and-herb-basted Coho salmon. We tend to stick with the pizzas, ten-inch rounds with thin, cracker crusts and toppings that range from pepperoni to barbecue chicken. Pastas come thickly, and sometimes strangely, sauced. We think gemelli with pork, black beans, fresh green beans, garlic, bell peppers and ginger is just plain weird, and though we’ll admit to enjoying the cavatelli with prawns, scallops and peas in a lime, coconut, red curry cream sauce, we don’t think we’d find anything like it in Italy. Stick with the straightforward, like penne with mushrooms, and the chopped salad, a perennial crowd-pleaser. We note that some dishes suffer from inferior ingredients, but the young and young-at-heart still crowd the place, particularly at happy hour. The operative words for the wine list: cheap and not terribly Italian, which about sums up the whole dining experience. Servers tend to be young and are perhaps encouraged to express a little too much self-expression.