Picasso's — Restaurant in Jacksonville

We were gifted a gift certificate to this restaurant. Be prepared my friends it will ruin every other Italian restaurant for you. The service is just remarkable. It was very evident that the waitresses care because people know each other by name there. Our waitress was not only friendly but she assisted us with picking a great wine to pair with our meal, walking us through the specials which were phenomenal, and then checking up on us every couple of minutes and just being extremely sociable. The food is like something out of a Gordon Ramsay restaurant. Actually I think it's better. Not only do they have awesome pizza that is matched by none other but I ordered the special which was Snapper over a bit of mashed potatoes and squash and it was just so beautiful I almost didn't want to eat it. The Taste was just breathtaking and I literally savored every bite. Everything we ate there was Top Notch and tasted like it should have been in the most expensive New York restaurant. Everything was fresh and almost everything from what I could tell was made from scratch which was a really big selling point. Then to top it off we made the mistake of asking about dessert. We didn't just come home with one dessert we went home with three different desserts! I highly recommend the strawberry cake! All in all this was one of the best dining experiences my husband and I have had. And for the quality of service we were pleasantly surprised at the cost being very affordable. I cannot say enough about how great this place was. I will never be able to eat at any other Italian restaurant again, definitely not the Italian chain restaurant I used to frequent down the road. Be sure to get there early cuz by the time we left at 6:30 on a Thursday there was already a line outside waiting for an open table. This is got to be one of the best Italian restaurants in all of...

My wife and I have been wanting to eat at Picasso's for quite some time... However, every time we went, the wait was incredibly long, and the restaurant was incredibly packed. Usually, this is a good sign. So we finally decided it was time to give it a try.

Long story short: I ordered Angel hair pasta in a pesto sauce with mushrooms. My dish comes, and the noodles are very clearly a Ramen noodle, and not angel hair. I hold it up for my wife to look at it and I ask her "Does this look like angel hair pasta to you?" She says it looks like Ramen. I take a bite, and the noodles are severely overcooked... A common mistake for people who are used to cooking pasta as opposed to Ramen noodles.

A quick Google search for "angel hair pasta" showed that angel hair pasta is straight... like thin spaghetti... And not curled, like what was in my dish. So I posted to my friends online, asking them what kind of noodle they thought it was. Every single person said it was a Ramen noodle. See the accompanying pic and judge for yourself.

The downside to all of this is that the staff at Picasso's tried to convince me that they make their angel hair pasta fresh in-house every day. That may be true, but what I got clearly wasn't angel hair pasta.

Honestly, when it comes down to it, a noodle is a noodle. And I wouldn't have minded the Ramen in my Italian dish... It's just that when rice noodles are overcooked, which these clearly were, the texture is very gritty and not at all what you would expect from a good Italian-made angel hair pasta.

Add to this, the noise inside the restaurant made it nearly impossible to hear the conversation of the person directly across from me, the smell of a burning sauce of some sort, causing people to sneeze and cough towards the end of our meal... and the $67 bill for 2 people....?

Yeah. We won't be going back...

Yep! I’ll be back…..

Celebration, family of 5 dinner that my 17 year old chose (thank you kid)! Family has been there before but my first time.

Cool looking space with an open kitchen concept. Great energy and vibe. The owners were walking around table to table ensuring everyone was taken care of, pouring wine and cleaning tables. Servant Leadership to its finest. Was very impressed with that. The male owner even remembered my kid was in a walking boot last time and asked how she was doing. Very nice touch……

Now to this food……We started with a appetizer of bread. Yeah, I said it……And so should you! Out came these uneven, oblong tubes of twisted-like bread drenched in this almost bath-able garlic butter sauce. The pillowy goodness melted in my mouth with each amazing bite.

I also ordered a Caesar salad. Now this is a personal preference but the salad came out almost like room temperature which was perfect! I am a salad “chopper” almost to the point of annoying but this was sliced so well that I didn’t chop at all. The dressing wasn’t overwhelmingly applied which is how it should be. So delicious….

I had the Spicy Pasta with Italian Sausage Meatballs. My goodness. The pasta was fresh, dense and cooked Aldente (sp?). The sauce was spicy but not too hot but bustling with flavor. The meatballs were the stars of this dish. Flavorful, deliciousness that were barely held together and could be sliced with a thought almost. Tender is an understatement and the flavors were astonishingly magnificent! The kids got pizza and even that was...