Minutello’s Restaurant & Lounge

Minutello’s is going out of business. Last day of operation is Sunday, February 17, 2013.

The food quality is good or not great. I do love the following. The anti-​pasto is very good. I love there wedding soup. Don’t write this place off due to some bad reviews, because they are flat out WRONG.

Based on some recent reviews, it looks like the quality of food at Minutellos has slipped a little bit. Still as I mentioned before, it’s a Shadyside institution located in the basement of an apartment building.
Anyway, the main reason to come to Minutellos is for the pizza. My cousin and I did just that the other night when we were in the area. We did the whole ‘Build Your Own Pizza’ thing, ordering ours with pepperoni, green peppers, onions, and mushrooms. Good pizza even if the place is beginning to look a little dated.

I went to this place because I had a LivingSocial voucher. Even with this voucher I feel like I paid too much money. I think I could have had better food if I went over to the Giant Eagle across the street and heated up a Lean Cuisine. I do have to wonder why the owners would put out the living social deal when what really would help business at the restaurant would be simply to improve the quality of the food.
The only positives I can give are that it isn’t pretentious and the waiter provided very good service. It was almost empty for a Monday at 7 PM, so if you are desperately starving, not able to go to better restaurants nearby or heat up food from your local grocer’s freezer, this might be a tolerable food option. Again, it is advisable to be desperately starving.

Hands down, Minutello’s is overpriced cafeteria food. Olive Garden seems like fine dining compared to this place.
You can already tell how bad your experience is going to be when they give you the complimentary bread that looked like it was bought from a convenience store. Not the crusty Italian bread. The generic Giant Eagle whole wheat bread that I buy regularly tasted 10x better. This so-​called Italian bread came with pre-​packed airline butter. No dipping oil with herbs and spices. Then we had the wedding soup which looked like it’s been sitting in the kitchen since this morning and was just reheated.
We had the appetizer platter, which was composed of allegedly banana peppers, calamari, and breaded zucchini. It was 95% breading. I can barely taste any calamari or zucchini. The worst was the marinara sauce, which tasted like it came from a can. Again, no herbs and spices.
For the entrée, I ordered rigatoni and my fiancé had baked ziti. The only way I can describe the sauce is: Think of diluted Ragu. My pasta was also overcooked and there was no flavor whatsoever so I had to put so much parmesan cheese. I couldn’t even taste garlic in it. What kind of Italian food has no garlic? The baked ziti was overcooked and dry, and it was tasteless according to my fiancé.
Service was slow, but there was only one waitress in the restaurant. I requested warm water and it took about 40 minutes until she finally served it. She was generally nice and probably embarrassed for serving such crappy food.
How much did it cost us? $ 50, including tip.
This restaurant was probably good back in the day. As we left the place, we saw a certificate of excellence for being one of the best restaurants in Pittsburgh. In 1993.

This was one of the worst dinners out I’ve had in recent memory. On the other hand, I wasn’t expecting much, so I guess the place lived up to my expectations. I’ve been trying to think of a good way to describe their food, and the best I can come up with is as follows. Imagine a cafeteria pasta dinner you might have been served as a child away at summer camp, and you’ll have a pretty good idea. In other words, the food is perfectly edible here, but boring, and nothing you would want to actually pay for. There was nothing disgusting about it, it was just extremely uninspiring. To be fair, I only tried the pasta, bread, salad, soup, and calamari, so maybe they have amazing pizza here… It’s possible, although unlikely based on what I’ve seen.
On the upside, the service was friendly enough, and there were plenty of empty tables at prime dinner time! If you’re hungry, you’ll definitely be full when you leave.

This is great, simple, traditional italian american food. The salads are good. The pizza is really great (I stopped ordering from anywhere else). The veal cannelloni is awesome too.

The place is ok. It has a full bar, it has enough space for a larger company. The reason why I’m giving 2 star rating is food.
It was okay at best. Veil did not taste right at all (my friend did not like either). Pasta… I could make better pasta/​sause myself and thank god they are not making wine there.
This is not the place to go eat italian food but a place for a get together as the staff was pretty friendly.