" If This Is "New York Style," I'll Eat My Hat "

Value for money		Suitable for...
The food		.. a date
The service		.. business dinner
The decor		.. with friends

When the best thing about a New York-style Italian restaurant in Shanghai is the French waitress, you have to wonder what's up with that...

On the ground floor of that new glass colossus at the top of Xiangyang Lu, Pronto advertises itself as a New York-style Italian restaurant. With this in mind, I conjured up images of a warm, bustling, yellow-lit trattoria staffed by burly Italian-Americans with Brooklyn/Sicialian accents, serving up hearty, flavoursome homestyle Italian grub. Ok, maybe that's an exaggeration, but you know what I mean.

What Pronto turned out to be was a chilly, sterile, empty, marble-floored cave of a restaurant with staunch decor and the atmosphere of the Roman catacombs. The menu has the usual array of Italian classics - pizza, pasta, appetizers, desserts. We had the gorgonzola and walnut bruschetta. It tasted like it had come straight out of a cupboard where it had languished all day. We were expecting oil-drenched bread with melty gorgonzola topped with chopped walnuts and drizzled with honey. Uh-uh. Dry, cold, and tasting of my little brother's socks.

The lasagne... how can I describe the lasagne... Mushy would be a good start. Mushy, and sweet. After a couple of mouthfuls, I decided to perform surgery to see what was giving it such an abbatoir-ish taste. The meat, instead of the usual minced beef, was grey meatloaf. I kid you not. Meatloaf! Slices of mofo-ing meatloaf.

The pizza rustica was nice enough, but at 85 yuan for 10 inches, is FAR too expensive. This is pricier than many of Strada's pizzas, which are much bigger and much better.

The atmosphere was deader than Caesar. Why not put on a bit of Dean Martin, or some jolly Italian tunes? Put up some paintings, swap the clinic-white tablecloths for red and white plaid.

Also, they should sack half of the waitresses (except the friendly French girl who was the highlight of our meal) to stop that awful "vulture" situation whereby you are watched, hawk-eyed, until you as much as twitch your intentions to drain your glass or put down your fork.

So yeah, not great. With a couple of tweaks, this place could work, but there are at least half a dozen better Italian places in town. If they pep up the New York aspect, it could carve itself a niche, but for now, I'd give it a miss.