Restaurant review: Maggiano's Little Italy

Look out, Buca di Beppo! Here comes Maggiano's Little Italy. Brinker International, parent company of Chili's, Big Bowl, Romano's Macaroni Grill and several other chains, has just opened its first upscale Italian-American casual dining theme restaurant in Edina's Southdale Shopping Center.

At first glance, the Maggiano's concept looks a lot like Minneapolis-based Buca: huge portions, family-style dining, red-checkered tablecloths, Italian background music and lots of old photographs on the walls.

There's a lot of overlap in their menus as well. Both serve many of the same Italian-American classics -- spaghetti and meatballs, linguine with clams, fried calamari, eggplant parmigiana, tiramisu, etc.

But there are some important differences. Buca di Beppo is much more playful; you would never find a 3D image of the pope waving greetings from Rome on the walls at Maggiano's Little Italy. Maggiano's, by contrast, looks a lot more like a traditional Italian-American spaghetti house. Buca has smaller dining rooms; Maggiano's has one big, very noisy room. Buca plays a lot of bouncy Italian tunes from the era of Louis Prima and Volare; Maggiano's plays all Sinatra, all the time -- except in the lounge, where singer/pianist Tom Hunter performs Wednesdays through Saturdays.

And though you can dine inexpensively at either restaurant, Maggiano's offers more high-end options, including a list of reserve wines that ranges into triple digits and entrees that top out at $32.95. Maggiano's portions are big, but most of them are not nearly as large as Buca's, where a full order of pasta weighs 2 pounds.

Maggiano's does offer a family-style dining menu for parties of four or more, for $22.95 per person. That includes a choice of two appetizers, two salads, two pastas, two main courses, two vegetables and two desserts, with an additional charge of $2 to $4 per person for the shrimp, beef and veal main courses.

As for the food, most of the dishes I tried seemed comparable to what I remember from Buca, and a couple of notches up in quality from Romano's Macaroni Grill or the Olive Garden. The tastiest dishes tended to be the most expensive; the USDA prime New York steak served contadina-style with roasted peppers, roasted potatoes, onions and Italian sausage ($32.95) was a superb piece of juicy, well-marbled beef, and the salmon with lemon and herbs ($22.95 full/$18.95 for a half-portion) was a fresh and flavorful piece of fish, served on a bed of over-salted spinach.

The mussels Tuscan-style ($6.95), in a savory broth of white wine, garlic and white beans, were plump and tasty, and the bruschetta topped with marinated tomatoes and shaved Parmesan was lively and refreshing. I also liked the linguine with white clam sauce ($14.95, $11.95 for a half-order) and the meaty and moist whole roast chicken with rosemary and garlic ($15.95, half-order $12.95). The whole order was easily big enough to serve three.

Most of the other dishes were pretty standard mass-produced Italian fare -- the eggplant parmesan ($10.95) had lots of red sauce and breading, but little detectable eggplant flavor, and the chopped salad ($9.95/$5.95) was mostly just a big pile of lettuce, with very modest amounts of avocado, finely crumbled blue cheese and a dusting of "crispy prosciutto" (which looked and tasted a lot like imitation bacon bits.) The zuppa di pesce ($17.95/ $13.95) was a big disappointment; it's supposed to be a seafood stew, but consisted mostly of pasta and canned tomatoes with modest quantities of mussels, clams, squid and little bits of salmon.

But Maggiano's Little Italy doesn't aspire to be a fine-dining restaurant; just like at Buca, the goal is to capture the festive spirit of an Italian family feast, where everybody sits around a big table and passes big platters piled with food.

Based on my two visits, sometimes Maggiano's succeeds, sometimes it doesn't. The Italian family feasts I have attended have always been noisy, even raucous events, but on one visit, the decibel level at Maggiano's was so high that two people at opposite ends of a banquette table for four couldn't hear each other. And service at a classic red sauce restaurant is supposed to be informal and maybe even brusque, but our servers seemed too busy to give us any personal attention.

My friends and I ordered family-style on one visit and averaged about $50 per person, including drinks, tax and tip, and spent about $40 per person the next time, when we ordered a la carte. Each time, we ate too much and went home with staggering quantities of leftovers. We could have dined better for less elsewhere.

But if you resist the temptation to order too much food (and if you can tolerate a lot of noise) you can have a good time at Maggiano's Little Italy for very little money. For example, four people could split a salad ($9.95-$10.95), a full order of pasta ($10.95-$15.95), and the whole roast chicken ($15.95), plus the simple but delicious Nonna's pound cake with caramelized bananas ($5.50), and not go away hungry.

Readers Report: Only a few calls: "Quite expensive, but the quality was excellent," "A little noisy, it was hard to talk," "Their portions are far too large, but it was very good, very good."

-- Jeremy Iggers is at jiggers@startribune.com.