Vesta — Restaurant in Redwood City

I started with butternut squash soup. Surprisingly creamy and also vegan! Savory, more savory than I expected and very well seasoned. They don’t provide salt and pepper at the table, which I noted, but neither was necessary for any portion of the meal. The roasted Brussels sprouts were plated with crisp bacon, toasted garlic and some crispy bread crumbs. The glaze is super sweet! Sweeter than expected but it was a nice contrast to the salty pork. The sprouts were deliciously roasted and soft, without becoming mushy. The Beet salad was paired with arugula. I love the flavor contrast of beets with arugula. The cheese shavings were delicious and they are big enough that you can taste the cheese by itself, which I appreciate. The “oddity” is the chucks of avocado in the salad. They are fresh and add an altogether different texture to the dish. The creaminess that one might miss because there is almost no salad dressing. I’m not a big salad dressing fan and I appreciate when a restaurant presents a salad robust enough to not need dressing. If the vegetables and spices are paired well, let their flavors be the center of attention! The little bit of dressing was citrusy, but it was an “extra” in the play. I liked this simple combination. Oh, and pistachios on top. A little crunch and nutty flavor. Very well built. At one point I was distracted by a beautiful smell, which turned out to be a mushroom pizza (sautéed mushrooms, thyme, goat cheese and truffle oil). If that is the same cheese in my beet salad I have to have that pizza! LOL. What a fun experience! Service was great and the decor is simple but very well planned. As much as the food stands out, the ambiance created by the kitchen and...

Random internet people, you've let me down. The mushroom toast was the only good thing. The pork shoulder polenta was not for me, and the carbonara pizza did not have carbonara on it.

The pickles with the pork were too sweet for me and not tangy/sour. The pork and bacon were too salty and dry. The polenta had bad flavor. It tasted like it was made out of old tortilla chip crumbs, which is obviously not the flavor profile I expect from a decent polenta*.

An egg on pizza is an egg on pizza**, not carbonara on pizza. Carbonara is a sauce made of egg yolk and parmigiano reggiano. This was basically a raw egg dumped onto the middle of a pizza. Plus the crust didn't have a very good texture; it tasted like wet, raw dough in the middle, probably from too much moisture in the toppings, and the char wasn't evenly distributed. Way too many giant, dry, popped bubbles around the edges.

*A great polenta can be had at Water Grill in LA.

**Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that. I've had a great version of that in San Francisco.

If we ignore for a moment that the egg should have been incorporated into the sauce in order to create the titular carbonara and not simply slopped on top, the egg on this so-called carbonara pizza was not cooked enough. It still had runny clear whites: only the yolk is supposed to be runny.

Plus driving around looking for, and then paying for, fairly expensive street parking made the whole exercise very not worth it to us.

I'll stick to Napoletana, despite all its issues, and the staff constantly asking me to take down photos of their mistakes - without ever correcting those mistakes or even apologizing for them, so...

My daughter just turned 2 and after spending a day at CuriOddysey, my wife and I figured we'd risk having a date with a possibly soon-to-be grouchy two year old on a Saturday night of all times. We've never been to Vesta and we honestly just picked it out since it had the kind of food that had the most success of being eaten by our child. Other than a few worrying times when we thought she'd pour on the waterworks, it was mostly a success!

The reception staff was kind enough to lug over a high chair for our daughter which she promptly refused to even deign to sit on so that's how the night started. However, she liked the meals! We ordered the grilled carrots for her but she apparently preferred my wife's pork meatballs - an impressive feat since she loves carrots and dislikes meat and we've been trying to get her to eat more of it.

I ordered the Italian sausage pizza and it was so good that I immediately had to look up how to make it from scratch at home. Lo and behold, the first search result for a recipe for Italian sausage pizza with mascarpone cheese just so happens to be from a random blogger who went to Vesta a few years ago and was also impressed by their pizza enough to post a homemade recipe for it after attempting to recreate it.

We had a good time and we haven't had many date nights in a little over two years so I was grateful for some normalcy. I look forward to going back with my wife one day and hope to have a more relaxed time with a pizza or two and a glass of wine while texting the babysitter to see if they have...